


you started a fire

by mahariels



Series: all your bridges are burning [8]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Drunk Sex, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, Jewish Character, Porn with Feelings, Slight Canon Divergence, Unresolved Romantic Tension, everyone is bad at feelings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-15
Updated: 2016-03-08
Packaged: 2018-05-14 04:54:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 22,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5730229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mahariels/pseuds/mahariels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the memory den is not a recipe for anything except disaster: it takes rosa to the glowing sea, and maccready to med-tek.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The illusion of keeping busy is a dangerous illusion. 

There’s always something more to do, and it’s easy to subsume herself in doing it. There’s always something broken that needs fixing, or another settlement Preston’s heard from recently, always someone else who needs help. It’s easy to make a list of things she needs to get done without ever finishing it. Today she’s out on the icy river under the cold winter sun, perched on top of the industrial water purifier she and Sturges built, replacing a rusted part. Her hands are busy, sure. Her mind’s blank and narrowed on the task at hand. And as soon as she stops, she’s hyperaware of the rest of her life building up in a slow avalanche on the hills behind Sanctuary, a cascade she’s not ready to confront. 

The Memory Den’s waiting for her with answers. She just has to put down her tools, pick up her gun, and go after them.

On the riverbank, Mac’s sprawled in one of the patio chairs she hasn’t scrapped for parts, nursing a coffee mug of whiskey and watching her work. He's got his boots propped up on the table. “You missed a spot!” he calls out to her, and takes a swig.

“I’m not _cleaning_ it, Mac, I’m replacing a part.”

“I’m bored, not stupid,” he retorts. “We heading out again anytime soon, Boss?”

She hammers the part into place and remembers. She’d pulled the trigger, and Kellogg’s corpse hit the ground. In all of the hours she’d spent imagining the moment and all of the detail she’d imagined it in, down to the way she’d jam the barrel of her pistol against his temple and the sound his body would make on the concrete, none of it accounted for the gaping vacuum crushing her chest. She felt nothing. She feels nothing.

If Kellogg didn’t lie to her—and she has no way of knowing, he certainly seemed like the particular kind of asshole who’d do a thing like that—Shaun might be alive, somewhere. But that boy can't possibly be Shaun, even if he did have a nose that looked suspiciously like Nate’s. Who knows how much time had passed between that brief, horrified moment of paralysis, and the Commonwealth? That nightmare, the one she’s replayed over and over again in her head since then, is a hazy white fog. It could have been five minutes or a hundred years for all the difference she’d have noticed.

She hammers the part into place and imagines it's Kellogg's head. The ruined pulp of his brain she'd smashed into with her bare hands, yanking out cybernetic parts with vicious efficiency, to Nick's amused disgust. 

She hasn’t told Mac about it yet. She’s not sure how to tell him.

She doesn’t feel anything except empty. 

“Tomorrow morning,” she says, “we leave for Goodneighbor.”

Nick’s already gone. Before he’d left he turned to her with the straight-forward manner that she finds so endearing, and asked her flat out if she was going to be okay. _I’m fine_ , she’d said, the same way she answers that question no matter who’s asking. No matter how she actually is. Nick’s glowing yellow eyes had seen right through her, she was fairly sure. _Go. I’ll follow soon._

“I think it’ll be a h—improved by the absence of Winlock and Barnes,” Mac says, grinning. She knows he’s really happy, because he’s smiling wide enough that she can see his teeth—he’s self-conscious enough about them, she's noticed, that they almost never show when he talks, and his smiles are always small. They're not bad teeth, exactly. Just Wasteland teeth. But it’s one of the small things about him that she files away and thinks about sometimes. “Just say the word, and I’m there.”

Her chest feels tight in that way it does sometimes, when he says things like that. She ignores it in favor of checking the part she’d replaced. It seems to be in order. 

“That eager to miss a good night’s sleep in an actual bed?”

“Wasting time here’s wasting caps we could be earning elsewhere, Boss.”

“Fair,” she concedes, re-hooks the hammer into her utility belt, and slides down the side of the purifier. Her boots crack through the thin ice, splashing into the freezing water; she can feel the cold through the leather.

She trudges up the side of the banks towards him, and he catches her eye with one of those smirks that depending on the time of day and the situation makes her want to smack it right off his face or take him back to her room, and he knows it. He gestures to his lap and says, eyebrows waggling, “Wanna take a rest? Got a seat warmed up for you and everything.”

A few months ago, she would’ve punched him just for suggesting it. But now, she’s almost grateful for the exaggerated humor of the gesture and the fact that she knows he won’t be upset if she refuses. That he provides such a consistent distraction. But even if she wanted to, it isn’t a possibility. She’s the General, still, no matter what else she is, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before she sits on his lap like a blushing schoolgirl where everyone can see. “In your dreams,” she says evenly.

“My dreams are a h—a lot more interesting than that, Boss, and I think you know it, yeah?”

There is no response for that other than a glare, even if it is true and even if she can feel the sudden flush of warmth at the memories. She isn’t used to flirting. Nate had been her first real boyfriend and they’d barely dated before they ended up married. Even then, he did the flirting while she told him exactly why he should shut the fuck up and he laughed at her for it. “I don’t have time for this,” she says, which isn’t entirely true. She could _make_ time. But there are too many other matters that need her attention, and she doesn’t like feeling her stomach lurch like that.

“Sure,” he says cheerfully, though only after a long pause. “I’ll leave you to it.” He hauls himself out of the chair, raises the mug in a sardonic little toast, and is gone before she realizes it was probably the wrong thing to say.

But she has a settlement to run, and she can’t run after him.

Preston smiles when he sees her coming, the slow, small grins that he’s only recently started showing. “Hello, General. Got the purifier working again?”

“Yes,” she says. “And the defenses?” He tells her about the training that he’s been conducting for the settlers, even the ones who aren’t Minutemen. Everyone should know how to defend themselves, even if they aren’t particularly good at it. Target practice with a bunch of farmers is always fraught at the best of times, and he took care to separate Marcy and Jun Long after putting firearms in their hands. The progress is slow but steady. She’ll take it.

“You’re doing good with them,” she tells him.

Preston sounds a little surprised when he says, “Thank you.” The sun’s beginning to set and the settlers are coming in from their jobs: Luz from the scavenging station; Matthew and Sachin from the defenses; the Longs from the garden; Sturges from the workshop. “We’ve done pretty well for them, haven’t we?" he asks.

“You’ve done well for them,” she replies. It’s true, after all. She might have helped them find Sanctuary and done a lot of the work to get it up and running, but Preston’s the one who handles the day to day disputes and squabbles, makes sure the farm keeps running in her absence. Takes the time to show a bunch of civilians how to use guns, which she’d never in another three cryogenically frozen lifetimes have the patience to manage.

He doesn’t answer right away, just looks away with a gleam in his eye. “Well. Uh, General. Let’s go get something to eat.”

She’s still distracted during the dinner, running over the conversation with Kellogg in her head, again and again. _A bit older than you expected, right… He’s with the people pulling the strings._ And still, Rosa feels nothing. The conversation flows around her, Sturges and Mac arguing about back issues of Grognak the Barbarian, Marcy and Jun trading icy requests to pass the tatos; Preston asking Mama Murphy how she’s been feeling since she got off the chems; Strong complaining about the cooked meat having no taste. It’s only when she looks down again that she sees Mac’s taken it upon himself to make sure her plate is full, and the strange feeling, sharp like a broken rib, grips her chest again.

He doesn’t look at her, but he doesn't pull away when their shoulders bump as he passes the noodles over to Mama Murphy. She looks down at the food she’s been picking at for the last ten minutes, and lifts her fork.

After the cleanup, Mac follows her back to the house, trailing a little behind her in silence. She doesn’t say anything, either; there’s nothing to say. Recently, whenever they’re back in Sanctuary, he’s been staying there with her. His clothes and meager belongings have gradually made their way into her storage chest. He hadn’t asked and she hadn’t said anything the first time she’d noticed, and now she doesn’t know how to feel about it.

Over the last few months she's made adjustments to the ruin that was once her home. Sheets pinned to the ceiling above the windows, privacy without the trapped feeling she has in small spaces. It's small improvements, acknowledgments that she's not going anywhere, that make her feel so asea when she takes too long to think of it. She unbuckles her armor and sets it down on the bureau, the same way, the same ritual every time she prepares to pray.

He sprawls on the bed while she murmurs the abbreviated _maariv_. She can feel his eyes on her back as she moves through the service, the way his breath fills the quiet between the words of the prayer, how loud her voice sounds in contrast: _daamiran b'alma, v’imru, amen_. It’s strange, the way shes’s so aware of him, even when he’s not doing anything, an itch at the edge of her consciousness.

When she’s finished, she doesn’t quite know what to do with herself. There’s no siddur to fold and replace, nowhere to go. Only the silence of the room hanging between them, the bed, and Mac. She looks up to meet his eyes, dark blue in the dim light. His face, after all of these months, is familiar in ways she did not expect it to be, the sharp line of his nose and the hollow of his cheeks, his beard grown in after long weeks on the road, the tired lines beneath his eyes. The way he stares at her like there’s nothing else in the room, tension tight in every muscle of his body.

He says, voice hoarse, “Come here,” and she does—not too quickly, so he won't get the wrong idea—but she sits down next to him on the bed, her hand sliding involuntarily to his thigh, though the warmth of another body, of _his_ body does not diminish the emptiness in her chest. When she leans forward to kiss him, it’s with an urgency she wasn't aware she felt and he responds in kind, taking her face in his hands. He kisses her like he’s been waiting all day or even longer than that, hard and open-mouthed, and she sighs into it, into hands that hold her as gently as they cradle his rifle when he's lining up a shot. The sigh’s the only small surrender she ever gives.

She scrambles forward, pushing him back down as she shifts her weight, straddling him without breaking the kiss. Inadvertently giving him what he’d wanted hours ago. His hands slide away from her face, down her back, tracing the lines of it through her shirt; she can feel the heat of them through the worn cloth. He tastes like whiskey and cigarettes, the cold night air. He’s hard underneath her. And when she pulls away to take a breath she realizes he’s still watching her despite his breath coming quick and short, brow furrowed. 

“What?”

He doesn’t answer, just surges forward to kiss her again, his hands fumbling with the buttons of the fatigue jacket. It’s one of the things that's surprised her most about him, how much he likes just _looking_ at her, all of the fucked up broken bits of her body laid bare. She’s just as guilty. It’s strange, getting to know someone else’s body like that. The scrawny, wiry muscle of his limbs, his scars, the embarrassing tattoo on his thigh she’d laughed at the first time it made its appearance, the trail of sandy brown hair down his abdomen. She’s memorized all of these small things with the intensity she used to study bird and plant names, the places to touch him that make him gasp and squirm.

She slips her hand under his duster and rakes her nails down his stomach, and he gasps into her mouth, pushing the jacket off. They break, briefly, as he lifts her undershirt over her head and she helps him out of the duster and his trousers. It’s inefficient, she always thought, the way that undressing someone's so easily distracted by warm skin, a kiss that goes on too long. The way that when she grinds her hips down on his cock, she doesn’t _want_ to move.

“Stop it,” he says. “You’re doing it again.”

“What?”

“Thinking, overthinking—”

They fall back against the pillow and she can feel the cold of the air and his hands prickling goosebumps all along her bare skin. If only it was so easy, not to think. If there was something that filled the void inside of her—Mac moves on top of her, a warm weight. Hands on her hips, stroking down her legs. He kisses her neck, her collarbone. His tongue teases her earlobe and his breath is hot against her and she shivers reflexively, almost annoyed at the way her nerves fizz at his touch, the lack of control she has. She takes his cock in her hand, then, satisfied when he falters, shudders. Pushes himself up to look down at her, a wordless challenge. _So you know what to do with that or what?_ he’d asked her once, and she’d punched him in the stomach (not hard, just so he knew who was boss) and he’d laughed, the chuckle low in his throat that sets something in her chest on fire, every time.

The other thing she’s learned about him since they started sleeping together is that he’s a fucking _giver_ , and if she lets him, he’ll go down on her for an obscenely long time. It’s almost embarrassing, having someone that… focused on her, even though she let him do it, once, and ended the evening weak-kneed and laughing. She can’t handle that tonight, though, and shifts her weight to flip him over—he laughs, mock-fighting back, but surrenders almost immediately when she presses a wet kiss against his abdomen, teasing lower. 

“ _Boss_ —” he says, pleading, because she will not give him what he wants, at least not right away. She bites, lightly, below his navel. Where his leg meets his torso. At the sensitive skin on the inside of his thigh. He’s forcing himself to hold still, practically shaking with the effort, and she can feel the heat of that power flush low in her stomach. “Boss, please…”

She takes him in her hand again, still straddling his legs so he can’t move, looking down at him sprawled and helpless. Eyes closed and chest heaving. Intense guilt grips her, then, that they’re doing this at all, that she can’t give him any more than her body, which means absolutely nothing. The husk of the woman she’d been. He’d said he didn’t mind, and she didn’t think he was lying to her, that day in Quincy. She lowers her head and forces the doubt away, licking from the base of his cock to the tip before she takes him in her mouth, shivering a little at the groan that elicits. Mac is the one selfish thing she’s allowed herself. The one live, warm thing in the harsh world she’d woken up to. 

Surely that’s not _so_ wrong?

The things she likes best about this, about all of it, are the reactions she pulls from him, the muffled groans, the way his fists clench against the bed, the grumbled protests when she pulls away and sits up, a protest gone entirely when she sinks down on him—slowly, slowly as he rocks up into her. She winces, a little—it always feels strange, before she adjusts. Like her body’s still not ready for this after two hundred years of non-use, no matter how much she wants him, no matter how enthusiastically she rolls her hips against his.

“Boss—”

She shifts again, setting the pace. Agonizingly slow, even she knows it. Torturing both of them. For the moment, just for the moment, that awful hollow in her chest seems to lessen as she fucks him, eyes slipping shut. Her hands grip the wire headboard for purchase and she sighs as his hands explore her body, more reverent than teasing now. “ _Shit_ ,” he says, when she shifts her angle, every downward thrust sending shivers up her fucking spine.

When she opens her eyes again he’s looking up at her, so strangely, in a way she can't decipher. Like he wants to memorize every small detail about her face but it hurts him to do it. She doesn’t understand it, doesn’t understand him. She doesn’t like to look away first, it’s an old habit hard to break, but she can’t meet his eyes. She _can’t_. She looks down. He says nothing, but sits up, pushes them both over again and thrusts hard, once, and again. 

_Oh_.

She’s never had an easy time losing herself to sensation; always, always there’s a part of her that stands in solitude, a tiny piece of her brain that can’t shut the fuck up, no matter how she’d like it to. It’s no different now. With her legs wrapped around his waist and her hands scrabbling for purchase on his back, her mind’s still fixing on strange details, like the way his face flushes and sweat beads his forehead; the way the muscle connecting neck and shoulders strains; the way his beard tickles when he buries his head in the crook of her neck. For a time, though, she almost loses track of it, almost forgets that she feels nothing. 

That at the heart of it, she’s inhuman.

She can tell he’s close because his breathing is fast, the groan of pleasure almost more of a cry. She presses her hand over his mouth, stifling the noise. “Shhh,” she says, voice choked in a gasp, “quiet, they’re going to hear—” She thinks he mumbles _so fucking let them_ but the words are muffled by her hands, unmoved. They’ve caught the rhythm of it now, and she’s moving without thinking about it, hips lifting to meet his. It _feels_ —it’s too much, and not enough. The urgency of the first kiss is back in his lips, and all she wants is to be closer, to _feel_ closer, despite the fact that her burning skin is as close to his as it can be. Her hand drops from his lips, mindlessly scrabbling instead to touch any part of him she can reach.

“Rosa,” he says, voice shaking, “fucking _goddamnit_. Rosa, _Rosa_ ,” and strangely, that’s the moment her overheated body decides it’s going to come. For a very long moment everything is blank, she can’t think about anything except how good he feels inside of her, around her, can’t think about anything except the fact that just for a moment, the only thing she feels in her chest is that all encompassing warmth. He kisses her then, almost desperately, and she lets him do it, still moving through the tremors of her own orgasm as he comes, his cry swallowed by her mouth.

For a long moment she thinks he might have fallen asleep on top of her, but then he starts to move, pulling himself away with an effort. Neither of them know what to say. She feels strangely empty without him, the chill of the evening starting to freeze the sweat on her skin, and she doesn’t want to look at him and see that odd, wistful expression. Doesn’t want to tell him something he won’t want to hear. 

She rolls over onto her side, curling her knees up against her chest, and feels nothing.

After a moment, though, his warm body presses up against her back, his arm slung over her waist. Tense, at first. Expecting to be pushed away. And when she doesn’t, he relaxes into it, his beard tickling the back of her neck and his knee nudging between her legs, and she has never regretted more than in that moment that she can’t give him more, that she can’t be the person he wants. 

“Night, Boss,” he mumbles into her neck, and she replies, “I’m waking you up early tomorrow, Mac.”

He snorts a sleepy laugh, but doesn’t complain. Time passes and his even breathing tells her he’s asleep. It’s just Rosa, then, awake with her own doubts, her own guilt. Tangled with a complication she was never ready to handle, a mistake she’s made and can’t undo—and doesn’t want to undo. 

Sleep is uneasy, and a long time coming.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the memory den goes about as well as expected.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> quick notes: playing around a little bit with the chronology of maccready's personal quest for the sake of him not waiting around for months knowing where the cure was and twiddling his thumbs. >:[

MacCready doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing with his life anymore, and it’s not a feeling he particularly enjoys. He’s used to having clear goals and being able to make plans to fulfill them. Make sure Little Lamplight kept running, take care of Lucy and Duncan, find Duncan’s cure. And yet, here he is too fucking early in the morning, smoking a cigarette on the curb of a ruined sidewalk in Sanctuary. Waiting for the Boss and half-considering whether it isn’t too goddamn early for a drink. It’s definitely too goddamn early for a drink, and they're about to head out for Goodneighbor, but at least if he’s drunk he might be able to think about something besides the way her face looked when he’d called her Rosa and the way she’d immediately turned away from him after it.

So yeah, he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing anymore. 

When he’d signed on with the Boss, he’d expected caps, someone who could slow down the Gunners if they caught up with him, and caps. The MacCready of all those long months ago would’ve laughed in his fucking face. Giving back the caps, following her on hare-brained errands to the ass-end of the Commonwealth just to make sure she comes back because he doesn’t trust anyone else at Sanctuary to do it properly and— _fuck_ , he’s got it bad. He’d told himself he wasn’t going to fuck it up, and he r _eally fucked it up_.

Lucy’s wooden soldier, tucked safely in his jacket pocket, feels like it weighs a million goddamn pounds sometimes, for all of the weight it presses against his heart. It’s not like he’s fucked that many people in his twenty-two years on the planet, honestly. Not while he was the Mayor, not many after he’d gotten out into Bigtown and before Lucy had found him again, and barely anyone between Lucy’s death and the Boss. No one who meant anything. No one he’d have given a shit about one way or another if they took a bullet to the face. He’s not fucking used to this, not anymore. 

The Boss matters, in a way almost no one else in the goddamn world matters, and he doesn’t know what the fuck to do about it. There’s not anything he can fucking do about it. She’d made that clear enough and he’d told her it was fine.

He stubs out the cigarette on the concrete and immediately lights another one. It doesn’t fucking help.

By the time the Boss emerges from the house, the sun’s almost up and he’s finished his cigarette. The orange jumpsuit met its doom in a particularly nasty sewer flood, and she’s taken to wearing fatigues under her armor now. It suits her, somehow. He can almost picture what she must’ve looked like back when she first met Nate, fresh-faced and neat as a pin, her compact frame swallowed by army green. Almost.

She sits down next to him on the curb, and he offers her a cigarette. When she takes it, she sets it between her lips for him to light, and he leans forward to cup his hand around it so the wind won’t whip the flame away. She breathes in, eyes closed. “Mac,” she says, on the exhale.

“Yeah, Boss.”

“This is an…unusual job.”

“More unusual than the time we pretended to be comic book characters? You’re gonna have to try pretty f—pretty hard to surprise me.”

She shakes her head. “Nick and I tracked down the man who murdered my husband.”

“You what?” MacCready’s not sure whether he’s more surprised that the man’s still alive and kicking, or that the Boss didn’t take _him_. He could really use that drink.

“He’s dead,” the Boss says, pressing along with the sort of brutal efficiency she always has. She’s almost studiously not looking at him, studying her hands instead, the cigarette she taps to tip the ash away. He looks at them, too. Whatever they were pre-war, the nails are broken and her hands are covered in oil stains, calluses, and burns. Hands he’s held in his own—

“Good. If you didn’t kill him, I would—”

Cigarette in hand, she smiles at him—one of those brief flashes that you could definitely fucking miss if you weren’t looking for it—and his goddamn heart stops. _Get it the fuck together, MacCready._ “He’s dead, but he had some kind of cybernetic implant in his head that I was able to recover. Nick thinks Dr. Amari might be able to make some sense out of it.”

“And then what?” he demands, because he remembers all too goddamn well what she’d said on the overpass in Quincy. _I’m not trying to find my son. I’m going to kill them all._ If anyone could do it, it’d be the Boss, but he knows exactly how a one-woman crusade against the goddamn Institute of all things is going to end. He understands the urge to save your own child, probably more than she’ll ever know, but that’s not what worries him. “What’re you gonna do with the information you find?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’ll work. We’re going to try. And I. I want you to be there.”

It doesn't exactly mollify the frustration—that she went without him, that she didn’t _tell_ him—but it does put a hell of a lot into context about last night. “Wherever you need me,” he mumbles, because he’s got it that fucking bad. And for good goddamn measure he lights himself another cigarette, because fuck knows he could use one right about now.

And then she has to twist the fucking knife a little more. “ _Thank_ you.”

He’s walked the road to Goodneighbor with her a hundred times before, probably, and this time is the most awkward. For someone who doesn’t usually have any fucking problem running his mouth, he can’t seem to get the words out today. There’s a grim determination to the line of her shoulders and even though it only takes them two, three hours tops for the walk, she spends the first half hour or so in silence. She only breaks it later on to tell him she’s got his back, when they run into another raider nest and he takes the lead.

After they’re done, the Boss picks through the smoking wreckage for ammo and anything useful, carefully dismantling one of the raiders’ .50 cal rifles to get at the bullets chambered inside it. She looks up at him when she hears the sound of his boots behind her, and her face is splattered with blood and grit and her glasses are a smudgy mess and he can’t fucking believe there was a time he didn’t think she was the most goddamn beautiful thing in the world. He could shake the hell out of her for not telling him about all of the _stupid shit she was doing_ (not that she’d let him) but in the end, it wouldn’t really make a difference.

Trying to stop the Boss is like trying to stop a goddamn radstorm and he’s just along for the ride.

“What?” she asks, a little suspiciously, and he realizes he’s been staring at her like a freak for the last few seconds.

“Uh. Nothing. You done yet, Boss? I’m not carrying all that shit for you this time.”

It’s a hell of a lot different, coming back to Goodneighbor now that he knows Winlock and Barnes won’t be waiting for him, and that Hancock knows who the hell he is. He can ease up a little, actually breathe when he’s walking down the street. The Boss has no fucking clue what she’s done for him, of course, and he’s not going to remind her. Technically, they’re even and he’s paid her back. 

In reality, the truth is a hell of a lot more complex.

Even when he was still living in Goodneighbor, MacCready avoided the Memory Den if at all possible. It was too goddamn creepy, watching all of those old husks lining the pods, dreaming their days away. Of course he’s got memories he’d like to relive, given the chance. Lucy smiling at him, the night he asked her to marry him. The afternoon Duncan was born and his entire life changed. Plenty of memories he doesn’t want to remember: kids he couldn’t save. Knowing he’d lied to Lucy. Lucy’s death. Duncan’s illness. But he keeps them all safely in his fucking head, where they belong. He also doesn’t want to see Kent again, because that idiot almost got the Boss killed at _least_ twice, and if he thinks too much about her telling Sinjin to shoot her first, he can feel his face turning red and hot.

The only fond memory he has (hah fucking _hah_ ) of the place is watching the Boss casually steal some caps from a drawer in the hallway, and that was the moment he’d decided he liked her a hell of a lot after all.

As they walk through the entryway, he can see Irma lounging on her couch at the far end of the room, feet tucked comfortably under her as she looks up Valentine. “Well, well, Mr. Valentine. I thought you’d forgotten all about little old me.”

“May have walked out of the Den, Irma, but I’d never walk out on you,” Valentine says, tipping his fedora to her. 

“Hmph. Amari’s downstairs, you big flirt.”

“Ah, Rosa,” Nick says, looking over his shoulder. “And MacCready. Ready to try to crack this case?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” the Boss—Rosa, he’d said; it’s absurd to be jealous of a robot but that’s the low point MacCready’s finding himself at right now. “Let’s go downstairs, then.” She glances sideways at him. “You ready, Mac?”

He shrugs. “Guess so.” That depends, of course, on what it entails, but at least she trusted him enough this time to come with her and keep her from doing so goddamn stupid again. It’s a short walk down the stairs and his boots sound loud in the quiet. If anything, the basement’s even creepier than the upstairs. The upstairs looks like a Wild West opium den, but the downstairs looks like a surgery where you’d wake up after a night out, missing a kidney.

“Dr. Amari?”

Amari turns around, and surveys the three of them: the Boss in her fatigues and armor, Nick with his half-missing neck and trenchcoat, and MacCready bringing up the rear, unable to relax enough to put down the rifle, even though Amari’s the only thing down here. “Yes? I take it this isn’t a social call?”

The Boss tilts her head in Valentine's direction. “This one’s all yours, Nick.”

“We need a memory dig, Amari, but it’s not gonna be easy," Nick says. “The perp, Kellogg, is already cold on the floor.”

“Are you two _mad_? Putting aside the fact that you’re asking me to defile a corpse, do you realize that the memory simulators require intact, _living_ brains to function?” Unfortunately, MacCready has to say that right now he agrees with the doctor, and that both Nick and the Boss are fucking nuts. Maybe the synth’s malfunctioning. Maybe the Boss has finally snapped, after all of these months trying to track down her family’s murderer.

“Technically, the corpse was defiled already,” the Boss says dryly.

“This dead brain had inside knowledge of the Institute, Amari. The biggest scientific secret of the Commonwealth. You need this, and so do we.”

“Fine. I’ll take a look, but no guarantees. Do you…have it with you?” Dr. Amari sounds like she almost hopes they don’t.

Any of the good doctor’s hopes are in vain, though. The Boss slams her pack down on the table, rummaging through it and pulling out a bloody packet, wrapped in greasy cloth. “Here’s… what I could find.”

Dr. Amari slowly unwraps the package, horror etched on her face as she uncovers the grisly little souvenir inside. “What’s this? This isn’t a brain! This is… Wait… That’s the hippocampus! And this thing attached to it. A neural interface?”

“Those circuits look awfully familiar…”

“I’m not surprised. From what I’ve seen, all Institute technology has a similar architecture.”

The Boss’ eyes flick from Amari to Nick, and her voice is steady—so fucking steady—that probably anyone who wasn’t as focused on her as he is would miss the desperation in it. “Nick’s an older model synth. Is he compatible?”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking. If we’re lucky, it should hook right in. But even if this works, Mister Valentine would be taking on a tremendous amount of risk. We’re talking about wiring something to his brain.”

“Don’t worry about me, Amari. I’m well past the warranty date, anyway.”

“I appreciate this, Nick,” the Boss says gravely.

It seems her thanks have the same effect on Nick that they do on MacCready. The robot shrugs, and says without hesitation, “You can thank me when we’ve found your son. All right, let’s do this.”

“Whenever you’re ready, Mister Valentine. Just sit down.”

“If I start cackling like an old, grizzled mercenary, pull me out, okay?” Valentine says, sitting down in the chair. He looks a little worried, insofar as a man made out of metal and plastic and held together with fucking chewing gum can look worried. But he sits without any sign of wavering, and MacCready can at least understand that total lack of self-preservation, against all of your own best goddamn interest. He watches the doctor slipping the interface through the back of Nick’s neck, and shudders reflexively. 

“Let’s see here… I need you to keep talking to me, Mister Valentine. Any slight change in your cognitive functions could be dire. Are you… feeling any different?”

“There’s a lot of… flashes… static. I can’t make any sense of it, doc.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Amari says regretfully. “The mnemonic impressions are encoded. It appears the Institute has one last failsafe. There’s a lock on the memories in the implant.”

“Is Nick okay?” the Boss asks, looking him over. As far as MacCready can tell, the synth’s still blinking, his eyes tracking them. 

“Yes, the connections appear to be stable. Hopefully, it’ll be as simple as unplugging the implant once we’re done. But that doesn’t get around the current problem. The memory encryption is too strong for a single mind, but… what if we used two?” Amari looks between the Boss and Valentine, stroking her finger over the bloody hippocampus. “We load both you and Mister Valentine into the memory loungers. Run your cognitive functions in parallel. He’ll act as a host while your consciousness drives through whatever memories we can find. It’s dangerous, uncharted territory, but… I don’t _think_ it will result in brain death.”

The Boss considers this for a moment, her arms crossed over her chest. Her face looks very white, under all of the grime, but she nods sharply and says, “All right. Let’s get started.”

“Boss, _wait_ ,” he interrupts. 

She looks up at him, with that mulish, stubborn set to her fucking lips. “ _What_ , Mac?”

“Can I talk to you for a f—for a second? In private?”

She lets him take her aside, follows him up the stairwell to the little back hallway that leads down to Amari’s clinic. She says, again, “What, Mac?”

“Boss, you can’t f—you can’t g—you can’t do this.”

“Of course I can,” she says, voice flat.

“You don’t know what’s going to happen, you could die—”

“I know.”

“ _That doesn’t mean anything to you_?”

“Mac,” she says again. He’s staring down at her, furious (more terrified than furious, if he’s being entirely fucking honest with himself), but her expression is as even and controlled as always. The only hint anything’s wrong is her eyes, gleaming behind the glasses. “I have to do this. I _have_ to.”

“Even if it kills you? How the fuck is that worth it?”

“It is to me.”

“If you’re dead, you won’t be able to—” He realizes, belatedly, that he’s gripping her arms in his hands, like if he holds onto her hard enough he’ll be able to stop her. The fact that she doesn’t push him away or punch him says more than it probably should. “Rosa, please—I don’t—”

Something in the hard line of her mouth softens and breaks, and she crowds him back against the wall. Leans up on her toes to kiss him, which is not fucking fair. Against his will, his body melts against the line of hers, the armor digging painfully into his stomach and chest but he doesn’t fucking care. He can’t help kissing her back, though it’s neither soft nor loving, all of his fury and terror behind the press of his lips. If she won’t goddamn listen to him, if this is the only way he can convince her—

She breaks the kiss but can’t pull away: he’s still got his arms wrapped around her waist, trapping her there. “Trust me, Mac.”

“Boss, that’s not f—that’s not fair.”

“I know,” she says, voice quiet. Her fingers are twisted in the scarf of his duster, knuckles white. “But I’m going to do it anyway.”

He takes a deep breath. Thinks about it for a moment. “If you fucking die in that thing—”

“You’ll what?” she asks, with one of those brief not-smiles. “Kill me again?”

“I’ll find a way. I always keep my g—my promises.”

Her next words are an order. “Let me go.”

He does, reluctantly, his hands brushing her hips as she disentangles herself. “I’m serious, Boss. If you die—”

“I won’t. Amari knows what she’s doing, and even if it’s—an unusual situation—”

“Look, Boss. I got it. You aren’t gonna change your mind. You don’t have to explain it to me.” It sounds a hell of a lot more bitter than he’d wanted it to.

She leans forward and kisses him again, hard and quick, and while he’s still reeling, says, “I’ll be _fine_ , Mac. Just trust me.”

But he can’t, of course. He follows her back down into the basement, shaking his head. It’s not like he can really stop her when she’s made up her mind, but that doesn’t mean he has to fucking _like_ it. It’s one thing to head out into danger together, to know that there are ferals and greenskins to fight. Concrete threats he can handle with his rifle. He can see them coming. But this? Whatever’s going to happen to her’s all in her own head, and he could end up watching someone he— _cares_ about die in front of him for a second time. 

“Just sit down over there. And… keep your fingers crossed.” Dr. Amari busies herself preparing the neural hookups. MacCready doesn’t fucking look at her hands, doesn’t look at the Boss. He’s staring at the corner of the room when he hears the hiss of the lounger pod descending, and only then does he see her laying there, very still, with her eyes closed. He doesn’t like to think about how fucking small she looks.

“See you on the other side,” Nick drawls.

It’s evident Dr. Amari is efficient at what she does, but that doesn’t make him feel any goddamn better about the Boss’ prospects. As far as he can see on the screen, it’s just static. “Is that normal, Doc?” 

“ _Yes_ , Mr. MacCready,” Amari says patiently, though she doesn’t look at him: all of her attention is on the dials and gauges, regulating whatever goes into making sure people hooked up to the memory pods don’t overload their goddamn brains. “The pod’s neural interface decodes the information, but it doesn't always translate to the screen depending on the complexity of the memories—and this isn’t even _her_ memory. What she’s seeing is not always what we’re seeing, at least on that monitor. I’ve grown accustomed to translating some of the raw data…”

While she works, MacCready stands there like a fucking idiot, watching her like a hawk to make sure she’s not screwing anything up. Amari throws enough pointed looks over the edge of her computer monitor that he eventually gets the idea and starts pacing the room instead. That loses its charm about half an hour in, when he’s figured out exactly how many steps it takes for him to get from one side to the other and Amari is glaring at him.

“Is she all right in there, then?”

“She has given me no indications of mental distress,” Amari replies, “and I can communicate with her, in a way, through microphone. She can hear me, even if I can’t hear her.”

“And if you can’t hear her, how—”

“Mr. MacCready, please, let me do my work—”

“How long does this _take_ , Doc?” 

“I’m not sure, Mr. MacCready. A regular visit to the Memory Den can be as short as fifteen minutes or as long as a few hours—I’m still searching for undamaged memories that Ms. Solomon and Mr. Valentine can explore—and you’re not helping, you know.”

Of course he’s not. It’s not any easier once Amari starts actually _finding_ memories for the Boss to explore, and even though he can hear some of her narration, the Boss is still lying in the pod, mostly silent and still. Occasionally an expression flickers across her face: he’s never sure if it’s a grimace of pain or something else. He listens to the doctor navigating the Boss through Kellogg’s memories and tries not to think too much about what she’s experiencing. 

Eventually, he just says fuck it and helps himself to a bottle of vodka the good doctor has (probably for legitimate reasons, even though she’s a scientist and not a medical doctor, right?) sitting on the counter and starts to work his way through it. It’s probably a testament to how much he’s been bothering her that she doesn’t even blink or protest when he helps himself.

The hours tick by. 

At first he drinks standing. Then he finds a seat on one of the spare chairs where he’s got a good view of the Boss in the pod. He leans his weight forward on the chair’s back as he pours himself another drink. It’s cheap liquor, burning harsh on the way down. He’s been pacing himself, but enough time’s gone by that his nerves are blunted and sheathed in the warm cloak of impending drunkenness when Amari says, “I, uh… I’m sorry you had to go through that again.”

He’s on his feet immediately. “Doctor, what—”

“That,” Amari says, but her usually calm face is grim, “is for Ms. Solomon to tell you, when she’s ready. Sit down, please. Her vital signs are steady, and her brainwaves are normal. Mr. Valentine is stable as well and the link between them is surprisingly solid, considering such a connection has never been achieved before. There’s nothing for you to worry yourself about.”

“Like f—like h—sure there’s not,” he mutters to himself, because no matter what he says, Amari is coolly confident in her own abilities. The Boss, though—she’s still lying there still in the pod, her face blank and void of everything that makes her _her_. It’s easy to miss, because she doesn’t crack a smile very often and her face is always as fucking expressionless as she can make it, but the tension playing beneath her skin, the tight control she wraps herself in—all of that is gone. He watches her chest rising shallowly and thinks, with all of the vehemence that he can muster, _fucking hell, fuck this shit, fuck this, fuck_ this. 

“Let me pull you out of there. As soon as you’re ready—” Dr. Amari is saying, and he’s on his feet _immediately_ , only a little unsteady on them, crossing the room to stand next to the pod as it opens. The Boss’ eyes are opening, and try as he might, he can’t see any difference to them. She looks like herself, though the dark circles under her eyes seem more prominent and her eyes are haunted. Amari bustles around them, but the Boss reaches for his hands first so he can haul her to her feet.

“Slow movements, okay?” Amari says, scowling at MacCready. “I don’t know what kind of side effects the procedure might have had. No one’s ever… done this before. How do you feel?”

The Boss is almost as unsteady on his feet as he was, and her hands grip hard on his shoulders. Almost bruising. “I’m okay, doctor. Thank you.”

“That’s good, but I want you to keep monitoring yourself. We have to be sure there’s no long-term damage. Are you… ready to talk about what happened in there?”

The Boss exhales, and lets go of MacCready’s arms. She crosses them over her chest in an almost protective gesture, and instead of answering the question, says without a waver to her voice, “We got what we needed. The Institute uses teleportation to get in and out.”

“Yes. Their greatest secret has finally been revealed. But that only leads to more questions. How does it work? Where do we go next?” Amari taps the side of her mouth with a pen, frowning.

The Boss says, flatly, “That scientist Kellogg was supposed to track down. Virgil. We need to find him.”

“You’re right! A rogue Institute scientist could answer all kinds of questions. Where did the memory say he was?” Amari frowns. “The Glowing Sea? That doesn’t make sense. No one goes there. Not even if they were desperate.”

“Why? What makes the Glowing Sea so dangerous?” the Boss asks, and MacCready screams inwardly because of course she doesn’t fucking know what the Glowing Sea is—he remembers, almost another lifetime ago, her casual dismissal of the Gunners—and because he knows her, and he knows she’s about to suggest charging into that radioactive wasteland without much hesitation, and he’s not going to be able to fucking talk her _down_.

“The name says it all. Radiation. So much that nothing there could possibly live. Nothing… Pleasant…” Amari is frowning at her again. She doesn’t know the Boss like MacCready does, but she’s not fucking _stupid_. She knows what’s coming. “Navigating radioactive hazards is nothing new, but the Glowing Sea can kill a man in seconds. That’s why it doesn’t make sense. Virgil fleeing into that hell. The exposure alone…”

The Boss says, “If we need to find Virgil, then I’m going after him.”

“If you’re going to go, be prepared. You’ll need some way to combat the radiation there. It’s called the Glowing Sea for a reason.”

“I’ll find a way to get through the rads. Don’t worry.”

_Don’t fucking_ worry?

“Good luck, and… be safe,” Amari says, which is wishful fucking thinking by anyone’s standards. “By the way, I unplugged Mister Valentine first. Removed the implant while you were waking up. He’s waiting for you upstairs.”

“Thank you,” the Boss says, and turns on her heel without looking at him, probably because she knows exactly what he’s gonna say.

“Boss, _no_ ,” he says, jogging to catch up with her. Grabs her arm to keep her from moving. “Hooking yourself into this pod was one thing, but the Glowing Sea? There’s _no way_ —”

“Mac, we’ll talk about this later, yeah? Please,” the Boss says. He’s entirely prepared to argue, but when she looks up at him, he can’t make himself do it. She looks fucking exhausted, as far as she ever does, the lines of her face tight and drawn.

“I’m not gonna forget it, Boss.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

Valentine is seated by the door, the fedora pulled low over his head. The yellow eyes gleam from under the brim and he looks up when he sees them coming. The voice that emerges from his mouth, though, isn’t one that MacCready recognizes—at first, he thinks he might’ve drank more than he thought. “Hope you got what you were looking for inside my head. Heh. I was right. Should’ve killed you while you were on ice.”

Luckily for Valentine, MacCready isn’t drunk enough to miss grabbing the Boss by the collar of her fatigues as she lunges towards the robot. “You want to try for round two? Let’s go.”

“What? What are you talking about?” Valentine asks, confused, as the Boss swings her arms in ineffective punches.

MacCready, still holding her back, says, “You… feeling all right, Nick?”

The synth sounds puzzled. “Yeah, I’m fine. Why?”

“You sounded like Kellogg just then,” the Boss says flatly. She’s stopped fighting, but her fists are clenched: MacCready might’ve released her shirt, but he’s ready to spring into action again if necessary. The danger’s not over, not by any means.

“Did I? Amari said there might be some ‘mnemonic impressions’ left over… Anyway, I feel fine, so let’s get going.” The glowing eyes focus on MacCready, standing at the Boss’ side. “Or I could head back to Diamond City, since you’ve got company already.”

The Boss glances between Nick and MacCready, and he tries not to sway on his feet. He’s not that drunk. It’s fine. “I’ll see you around, Nick,” she says, and MacCready breathes a sigh of relief.

“Good luck out there. You know where to find me.”

“Thanks, Nick,” she says. They watch him leave, and then the Boss turns the force of her undivided attention on him. “Were you _drinking_?”

“It was a hell of a thing, watching you in that f— in there. I don’t know how time was going for you, but it was hours out here,” he says. It’s not an argument. “I told you, you could’ve died. And I didn’t know what the f—what else to do.”

There’s a long pause, and he can almost see the thought process flickering behind her eyes. She sighs. “You know, Mac, I think you’ve got the right idea.”

The sun’s already set and she leads him down the stairs into the Third Rail, retracing his footsteps from months ago, except he’s not alone this time. It hasn’t changed one goddamn bit; Magnolia’s throaty voice hanging in the air with the cigarette smoke. The Boss makes a beeline for the bar, her hand brushing his, just for a second, to indicate he should follow.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you drunk.”

“There’s a first time for everything, right?”

“Boss—”

They sit down at the bar, already packed. The stools are pressed close together against the crush; her knee brushes his, and she looks up at him with eyes that’re fucking… he doesn’t know what that look is. And he might already be drunk but he could fucking stare at her like that for goddamn hours. It’s embarrassing. She says, “Let me buy you a drink.”

He surprises himself by laughing. “What, Boss, are you _taking me out_?”

“Maybe,” she says, waving Whitechapel Charlie over. “Maybe it’s an apology.” She’s not a drinker, really, but she pours both of them a double, with efficiency, and swallows hers without a wince and barely a breath. 

“An apology for what?”

“Who the hell knows anymore,” the Boss says, and slides the other glass along the bar until it bumps into his hand.

He drinks. She drinks. Time goes by. His hand’s on her knee. Her hand’s on her glass.

“So are you gonna tell me what happened in there?”

The Boss swallows her whiskey. He’s fucking fascinated by the way the muscles of her throat move when she does it, distracted again by the grimness in the line of her mouth. “Kellogg’s fucking life story, right up through the time he killed Nate and took my son.”

“Oh… _shit_.”

“Yes.” She pours them both another one, and he’s about to tell her to slow the hell down, but who the hell is he to argue? 

It’s hard to tell a difference with her, drunk or sober. Her voice sounds exactly the same, flat and expressionless. She’s still as tightly wound as ever, the only thing he can see is her shoulders are slumped forward instead of ramrod straight and she doesn’t push him away when he traces his thumb down the side of her cheek, brushing over her lips for the barest second. “Boss—you okay?”

“I’ve seen it before,” the Boss says, and her mouth twitches. When she looks up at him, her eyes are dark and fucking fathomless. Her voice is so careful, so fucking even. “Lived through it, even. What’s once more? It was just in my head. I’ll be fine.”

He’s not sure if he believes that. He doesn’t believe that at all, really, but all he says is, “So what’s the plan?”

She smiles at him, slowly, the expression unexpected enough to almost knock him off the fucking seat, “I thought I’d sleep on it.”

A few hours later, they’re stumbling back towards the Hotel Rexford, detouring only when she pushes him into an alley and against the wall. It’s funny; she’s so fucking _short_ , a few inches smaller even than he is, but she packs a fucking wallop. He makes a half-hearted protest that’s cut off by her mouth and her hands down his goddamn pants like they aren’t out in the middle of the fucking street where anyone could walk by. When he manages to pull away, just for a second, he tries to say, “Boss, I dunno if—” but it’s useless.

He’s drunk, not stupid. He’s starting to get the idea that this is what happens when she’s feeling things she doesn’t want to be feeling and he’s of two minds about it. If this is all he can be to her, that’s fucking one thing. But _goddamn_ , it doesn’t feel good. 

“Mac?” she mumbles into his neck, sensing his hesitation. She pulls back to look at him. Her lips are red and swollen and her eyes are hazy and he’s too fucking weak to say no to her.

“Nothing. C’mon, Boss. Let’s…”

Afterward, considering how drunk they are, he’s fairly impressed at the way she manages to maneuver them into the hotel, pay for a room, and drag him bodily up the stairs. He’s fairly sure that if he didn’t know exactly how much whiskey she’d just put down, he wouldn’t even be able to tell. Meanwhile, he’s making a careful effort to put one foot in front of the other because the room is fucking spinning. He regrets, just a little, getting started so early.

She locks the door behind them, not that that’d really stop anyone from breaking in in this dump, and turns back to look at him. “Mac, I—”

“It’s fine,” he tries to assure her. And his own goddamn self.

They end up on the bed. Her armor ends up on the floor, along with his clothes. He doesn’t remember who pushed who down first. It doesn’t matter. She’s naked, exposed in the dim light, her body so familiar to him now. She’s on her back, twisting and writhing underneath his hands, gasping at his mouth on her nipple. This is the one difference between the Boss drunk and the Boss sober; sober, sex is a quiet, furtive thing and now she’s setting him on goddamn fire with the noises she’s making, every touch eliciting a groan or a cry she’s unable or unwilling to bite back. 

“ _Please_ ,” she says, when he lowers his mouth to her, and “yes,” when he reaches up to kiss her and she licks the taste of herself from his lips, and “fuck me, goddamnit, _fuck me_ ,” when he pushes himself into her, neither of them willing to wait any longer.

Her muscular thighs grip his sides, almost bruising, as he obliges her. Slowly at first, until her frantic pleas and heaving hips take the decision away entirely from his fucking conscious mind. He pulls back, pushing himself up to look at her, her hair grown out long enough to spread dark and messy over the pillow, at her eyes closed. When she realizes he’s stopped, she opens them again, staring back at him. 

“Mac,” she murmurs, and reaches up to brush the hair falling into his eyes back, an uncharacteristically tender gesture that breaks his fucking heart all over again. It’s not just that he’s got it bad, and it’s a fucking shame he had to be this drunk to admit it to himself. It’s a hell of a lot worse than that. He had to go and fall in fucking love with the goddamn _Boss_ , a woman who’d made it clear as fucking crystal fiberoptic that she couldn’t…

He’s not going to fucking think about that now. He’s not going to think about that at all.

Something shadows her face as well, and she says, “ _Move_.”

He loses himself in her, lets her call the shots. She tells him when, how hard. She orders him not to come. 

“No,” she says, when he’s trembling with the effort of _not_ doing it. “Pull out.”

“ _Boss_ —”

“Trust me,” she says, and he doesn’t, he fucking _doesn’t_ , but he’s got no fucking choice. She’s turning around, now, and he slides into her from behind—so fucking easily. She’s so fucking wet and he doesn’t ever remember her being this—eager? desperate? Not even the first time, trapped in Concord during the storm, felt like this. He presses her down with a hand on the small of her back, hisses as she pushes back in response or retaliation. He looks down at her, her weight resting on her forearms, her back arching and the play of muscle across it, her hands fisted in the blankets, and thinks _Jesus, what the hell have I done?_

He can feel it, when she’s ready, her thighs trembling and the innermost parts of her clenching around him, and he pulls her back up into his lap as she twists her head to kiss him, viciously nipping his lower lip as she does, and that’s it, he’s fucking done, he’s goddamn _lost_.

A few hours later she wakes him up, her hands roaming over his ass, blunt nails raking down his thighs. “Jesus, again?” He’s not sure whether he’s impressed or slightly horrified, but she just laughs at him and climbs on top and yeah, he might regret it in the morning, but oh, _oh_ he can work with this.

He opens his eyes again, an interminable amount of time later, when he feels her moving. “Boss?”

“Shh,” she whispers. “I’ve got to take a piss. I’ll be right back.”

“You better,” he mumbles back, and closes his eyes, just for a minute.

When he opens them again, he’s got a splitting headache, the sun’s shining bright through the fucking window ( _ow_ ) and the bed’s cold. He throws his arm out, fumbling. She’s gone. He opens his eyes: there’s a note on the pillow in her neat, careful writing.

> _Mac,_
> 
> _I know you’ll be angry, but I have to do this. I won’t risk your life, too._
> 
> _Don’t follow. If you ever owed me anything,_ ~~ _if you ever ca_ ~~ _this is the favor I’m calling in. We’re even._
> 
> _-R._

He crumples the paper in his hand, reflexively, then smooths it out and reads it again. And again. Miraculously it says the same goddamn thing each time. _Fuck_ , but she knows exactly how to fucking play him. He could go after her, sure. But he fucking owes her, the kind of debt he’ll never be able to repay, and she had to fucking call it in. He rests his head in his hands and mumbles, “ _Fuck_.”

The neighborhood watchman hanging around outside the Rexford confirms it. She left three hours ago, in a hurry. A hell of a head start, even if he didn’t… fucking… owe her.

If he didn’t fucking love her.

And because there’s nothing left for him to do, he goes back to the goddamn Third Rail. Whitechapel Charlie doesn’t say shit to him, because he’s clearly not in the mood for it, so he orders a fucking drink. There’s no sense in avoiding it, at this point. The Boss is gone, he doesn’t know where and how to follow her, he _can’t_ follow her, and he’s got nothing but nothing when it comes to Duncan’s cure. Might as well get wasted. He downs the whiskey with a grim sort of determination he hasn’t felt since right after Lucy died. In a way, it’s worse—then, he had Duncan with him, and he couldn’t afford to do this. He had to be strong for both of them.

Now? He’s got fuck all.

“Cheers,” the man sitting next to him says in a dead sort of voice. MacCready doesn’t say anything back to him, because misery certainly does not fucking love company, whatever the old sayings might be. Not that that’s ever stopped a drunk at 10am before. The man looks sideways at him, lifts his glass, and says, “To dead friends.”

That’s a little too fucking prescient for MacCready, given the circumstances, so he glares at the drunk and hopes he’ll get the right idea. But of course, with his fucking luck in the absolute shitter these days, it doesn’t work.

“Fuckin’ _plague_ ,” the man’s muttering to himself. “Fuckin’ plague, fuckin’ blue boils…”

“Hold on, _what_ did you say—?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> things don't go well, as they tend to.

“I said fuck the plague.” The man scowls into the glass like it was somehow responsible for infecting his partner.

“No, no. Heard you there.” MacCready’s trying (fucking _failing_ ) not to sound too eager. The guy might be a pathetic drunk but he’s got the look of a merc to him anyway, patched-up armor and grayed-out hair and a scarred-up face. And any merc worth his goddamn salt’s not going to give up anything without asking for caps, caps MacCready can’t afford to waste right now. “Blue boils, huh? Never heard of any plague like that.”

“I never heard of it either, until my… my partner got sick. He was fine one day,” the man says fiercely, “and then the next, covered in blue boils. Then he got _weak_.”

MacCready’s fingers grip the glass so hard he’s half surprised it hasn’t shattered under the pressure. In all of the months he’s been wandering the Commonwealth Wastelands, he ain’t heard a fucking _peep_ about blue boils. And now here he is, a random encounter at ten o’clock in the fucking morning, and he wouldn’t have even been here if the Boss hadn’t… “Guess he didn’t pull through,” he says, trying to imitate the flat tones she uses sometimes.

Keep it _cool_ , you dumb son-of-a-bitch.

“He died this morning.” The drunk looks down at his hands. Downs the rest of his whiskey. He immediately pours another.

“Sorry,” MacCready says. His voice is subdued and respectful but he’s sure as hell not _sorry_. He’s fucking _ecstatic_ , hopeful in a way he hasn’t felt in goddamn months. If this poor bastard’s partner had to die to give him that, to give _Duncan_ that, as far as MacCready’s concerned it’s a fair fucking trade.

“Yeah, me too, pal,” the merc says, shaking his head. “Fuck. What kills me is that even after being sick all these months, we were so close to being able to cure him, and he just up and died on me on the way to the research facility. His body couldn’t fight it anymore.”

MacCready says nothing, but he’s practically vibrating out of his goddamn seat with barely concealed excitement. If he keeps the drunk talking, he might even be able to get the information without having to explain why he needs it. He might even be able to get the information without having to pay for it. The entire world’s coming up MacCready, it seems.

“Sinclair,” the man says, and extends his hand.

MacCready shakes it, quick and firm. “MacCready.”

“Shit,” Sinclair says, and takes another drink. “Listen to me. Crying like an old woman.”

“Losing a friend’s no small thing.”

“A friend,” says Sinclair, and laughs, the bleary gray eyes raking over MacCready, critical and questioning. “You’re right, kid. It’s no small thing. Jesus, how old are you, even?”

“Old enough.” He doesn’t even bother trying to explain it anymore. Sure, he’s twenty-two (probably closer to twenty-three at this point, not that he’s entirely sure) but he’s lived at least three goddamn lifetimes in those years. Topsiders who didn’t grow up in the circumstances he did don’t fucking understand that, and he doesn’t bother trying to explain anymore. Even in the Commonwealth, telling people you started drinking at six and killed your first man at ten tends to raise an eyebrow or two. “Hey, Whitechapel. My friend here could use another bottle.”

It might pain him to part with the caps, but he’s looking at it as an investment.

Sinclair sighs, and says, “Thanks.”

They drink in silence, but MacCready’s not really drinking now. He can’t afford to be drunk. Can’t afford to miss a goddamn thing. “So you almost cured him, huh? This doesn’t sound like any plague I’ve ever heard of before.”

“As far as I can tell, no one’s ever heard of it. Westy was the first, and probably the last. I still don’t know what the hell it was. Or why I didn’t get sick.”

MacCready pours him another drink and hopes to fucking god he’ll get to the point _soon_. 

“It took months of running through the Commonwealth, chasing after the barest fucking rumors,” Sinclair sighs, and swallows hard. “The cure—the only hint of it we could find was in a Med-Tek research lab…”

He almost chokes on his own drink. _He knows where that is_. Med-Tek ain’t far from Medford Hospital. Ain’t far from the Boss’ old Temple. _Hell_ , he and the Boss had been _right there_ within the last few months even, walking by. _Another fuckin’ lab_ , he’d said to the Boss. _Wanna take a crack at it? Bet there’s chems inside_ , he’d said. He can picture it, the imposing gray wall rising up above the stairs. She’d turned him down. They’d been rushing to the aid of another settlement. _Fuck_. “Med-Tek, huh? So if you knew where it was, why didn’t you just go get it? If that was me, I wouldn’t wait.”

“Had to find the security codes,” Sinclair says. “‘Cause nothing’s ever fucking easy, right? And it’s full of fucking _ferals_. We were resting up, hoping Westy’d be up for it when… shit.” He’s not crying, exactly, but he’s gulping, a deep ragged sob that comes up deep from the chest. “Shit, he’s gone, he’s really fucking gone. Jesus fucking Christ.” He puts his head down on his arms, hiding it in the crook of an elbow, the sobs muffled by his sleeve.

It’s frankly pretty goddamn embarrassing, watching a grown man break down like that, and MacCready can’t quite watch it happening. He looks away. He sticks around, though, because only wild deathclaws could drag him away at this point. Time passes and Sinclair’s breathing slows and MacCready takes his fucking chances.

He was never much of a thief. He never had to be, not really. In Little Lamplight, they shared their resources, and stealing from one of the kids under his protection would’ve been wrong. He’d exiled others for the same offense. It wasn’t until Big Town, and it wasn’t _really_ until leaving Big Town behind in the dust (fuck _that_ place) that he’d had to pick up the skill, mostly for survival’s sake until he’d built his name and started making contracts that payed. But this _is_ survival, _Duncan’s survival_ , and if he’s ever needed luck on his side, if there’s ever been a god watching his heathen ass anyway, MacCready’s fucking praying to it _now_.

He slips his fingers, gently, into Sinclair’s pockets. Turns out, they’re mostly filled with junk, old contracts and receipts and a few caps (it’s only because the asshole’s clearly grieving that MacCready doesn’t take those too—because he’s getting soft in his old age). He flips quickly through the crumpled papers until he finds what he’s looking for: a page of carefully written override codes, a convoluted mess of letters and numbers in someone’s painstaking script, and his heart fucking stops for a second. 

All of those months of searching. All of those months of agonizing worry. Of patient letters from his son. Resolved, in one tiny slip of a paper, so easily missed. In a fucking _coincidence_.

Strangely and futiley, he just wishes the Boss was here to share the moment. She’d probably be thrilled, as much as she ever cracks a fucking smile.

But the Boss ain’t here, Sinclair probably won’t lie there passed out forever. 

Time to fucking _go_.

He moves fast, when he’s got to. The first stop is the room upstairs to get his shit together, and then Daisy’s shop. She’s turned a friendly eye towards him since he started lending her a hand those awful first few months when he’d left the Gunners and was spending most of his time holed up in Goodneighbor drinking himself blind. It wasn’t entirely altruism on his part—once he found out that she had caravan contacts and they trusted each other enough, she’s sent letters and caps home to Duncan for him and he can trust they actually _get there_.

“MacCready!” Daisy exclaims, a smile lighting up her burned, leathery face. “How are you?”

He opens his mouth to tell her, but whatever he’s gonna say won’t do it any fucking justice, for once. So instead, he says, “Daisy, can I ask a favor?”

She looks him up and down, shrewd as ever. He never asks for favors. They’re friends, of a sort, but their books are _always_ fucking balanced. He’s goddamn scrupulous about it. “I don’t like the sound of this.”

“I’ve got something I gotta do,” he says, handing her the sealed envelope and a small mentats box filled withcaps, “and if I don’t come back in a week, will you get this to Duncan for me?”

“Of course, MacCready, but what on earth—”

“It probably won’t be necessary,” he attempts to reassure her. “Just a contingency, right?”

“I don’t much like the sound of this.”

“I know. But it’ll be fine. Thanks, Daisy. You’re an absolute _angel_.”

“Stop flirting with me, young man, you know I’m too old for you.”

He chuckles, the adrenaline high still fizzing all along his skin. He’s going to cure his son. He’s got a fighting chance. A chance, a goddamn _chance._ “I know, Daisy. But please? Do that for me?”

“Of course, MacCready.” She wipes her dish rag across the counter, polishing it even though it’s fucking spotless by any standard, and especially Goodneighbor standards. “But do _me_ a favor? Don’t make me actually need to do it.”

“I’ll try,” he says. It’s not a promise, but it’s as good as he can do.

It’s not until he sets out on the road to Med-Tek that he realizes, really realizes, how much he fucking misses the Boss. He’s traveled alone in the wastes before—before finding Little Lamplight, the Capitol before Lucy left Little Lamplight for Big Town, the Commonwealth in between the time he’d left the Capitol, the time he’d joined up with the Gunners, and the time he’d left with the Boss. For someone who fucking _hates being alone_ he’s spent a hell of a lot of his life by himself and damned well gotten used to it. In less than a year she’s gotten under his skin in a way he can’t entirely explain. He’s gotten used to having her curled up at his side when he takes the second watch. He’s gotten used to her cool voice calling _I got your six_ as she swings to cover his back. He’s gotten used to her listening to his stupid jokes when he can’t stop running his fucking mouth. He’s gotten _used_ to having her there. 

He’s got to fucking get used to being alone, because Duncan’s depending on him. He’s got no fucking choice. But that doesn’t make the long walk any easier to tolerate.

It’s the silence that’s the worst. It’s not like the Boss is fucking chatty even at the best of times, but he feels even stupider talking to himself, so he doesn’t. 

The wild hope he’d felt in Goodneighbor is being tempered by his natural tendency to expect the absolute worst out of everything. Optimism’s as fucking unlike him as altruism. There are a million fucking things that could go wrong now that he’s so close. Hell, Sinclair’s Westy didn’t even make it one goddamn day after they’d set out to do it before dropping dead. He’s not a superstitious motherfucker but that’s a little too fucking much, even for him. 

He’s careful. He’s careful as all hell, but it’s hairy. Without being able to sleep—no one to watch he’s back while kipping—he’s running on empty. He probably should’ve waited a _little_ longer before leaving Goodneighbor. Waited until he’d recovered from the night the Boss had dragged him through. But Duncan can’t fucking wait, so he’s got to work with what he’s got.

It’s dangerous, but it was always going to be dangerous.

He takes the approach careful as he can but it doesn’t fucking matter. Even if he’d been using a stealth boy, there’re enough fucking ferals in the lot that he can tell it’s going to be a slog. He’s got to conserve ammo because there’s no telling what he’s going to find in there, or how deep it’ll go. It’s a huge facility and those kinds of places always have hidden, secret shit you’d never think to find. Hidden secret shit you’d never _want_ to find. Sometimes he thinks of Vault 87 and wonders what the world before must’ve been, that there were so many places like this just fucking _out_ in the world. Waiting to be cracked open and unleash hell on the rest of them.

He stops to take a breath before he goes in. The stairs are littered with ghoul arms and blood. The stench is overwhelming.

Duncan’s cure is waiting for him.

He doesn’t kick open the doors, though it would’ve been satisfying to do it. He slips into the ruined lobby of Med-Tek as quietly as he can, heel first and the rest of his boot rolled down softly as he can manage it. At the first shot, though, he realizes his mistake. _He doesn’t have a suppressor_ , and he doesn’t have backup. The crack sounds very fucking loud in the silence of the building and the ferals fucking _fly_ out of the woodwork. It’s not that it’s hard, picking them off, even though they’re fast. He can line up a shot and fire it off under pressure—it’s why he did so well with the fucking Gunners. They needed a sharpshooter who had his shit under control and that was MacCready.

But he has to reload eventually.

The problem with ferals is that they’re dumb as fucking rocks, dumber even than mirelurks, but they don’t fucking stop. They’ll keep coming until every last bit of you’s bloody and tattered. He bashes out with the butt of the rifle, but unless you destroy the brainstem or their limbs, they’ll keep fucking coming. And they do. He fumbles the reload, twisting and kicking to keep them away. 

That was his mistake.

The first bite is the worst. The teeth, dull and rotting as they are, clamp down with mindless force and _shake_. And more teeth. And more teeth. Clawed fingers, scraping his face. They’re biting and growling and trying to rip him apart and in between shots, without anyone to watch his six, he’s fucking helpless. He’d known another guy who’d holed up in the subway tunnels once, not long after it happened, and all that was left of him was bones. It’s not that ghouls are dangerous on their own. They’re stupid. They go down easy. But in a pack, when they _get_ you so you can’t move, that’s when they’re fucking vicious. That’s when you can’t do anything except run or get ripped to shreds. This is what Lucy would’ve felt, before she died, that ragged, furious pain of the immediate bite and the deeper bruise of teeth on bone.

There was a time he felt he should’ve joined her.

But Duncan needed him. Duncan _needs_ him. 

He yanks himself back (and tries not to think about how much it fucking _hurts_ when the teeth are forcibly ripped from their grip) and fires. One, in the eye. Two, takes the top of its head off. Three, between the eyes. Four, through the jaw. Five. Six.

MacCready opens his eyes and realizes he must’ve passed out on the floor. He’s bleeding pretty bad. As far as he can tell nothing’s broken beyond all repair, although he’s got more puncture wounds than he’d care to consider from an infection standpoint, there’s a deep bite on his stomach that he doesn’t want to think about too much and when he looks down at his arm, where they’ve ripped through the sleeve of his duster, he’s pretty sure he can see yellow fat and bone. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” he groans. 

At least there’s no other ghouls in the lobby, so far’s he can tell, but he’s not going to fucking make it if he tries to get any further in. Not in this condition. Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ , goddamnit, he was too fucking cocky—Sinclair had said it was full of ferals but he’d thought he could handle it on his own. He’d fucking miscalculated. And to make it worse, he’s going to be easy fucking prey for anyone who wants to take advantage, which is half of the goddamn Commonwealth. Okay. Think about this logically, MacCready. Stay here, die. Go out there, _maybe_ die.

Maybe live.

The choice is clear. 

Standing hurts. One of the bites ripped through his leg and every movement of the muscle fucking _hurts_. Pain’s one thing. If the Boss was here, he’d probably make a big show out of it, complaining. Because that’s what he does. Getting it out there makes it easier to bear. Making a joke out of it, hell. That’s the only fucking way you get through life. He’d listened to the kids in Little Lamplight when Lucy patched them up, bitching and moaning. He remembered, another lifetime ago, telling someone, _no one’s on fire or bleeding or anything? That’s about as much as we can fucking expect_. They’d gotten through all of that together.

Alone? He’s just got to get _out_.

He stumbles down the road. His vision’s going a little black at the edges and he takes a deep fucking breath. Blood loss. Okay. He can deal with this. He’s done this before. He’s lived through worse, right? He may look like hell, but he’s still walking, for now, and that’ll do. What’s the Boss always telling him? Just keep going. One foot in front of the other. Just keep _going_.

He’s managed to walk south a ways before his legs give out. 

A familiar voice says, “Is that _MacCready_?”

“Lucas fucking Miller?” His luck is too fucking good, all things considered, and if there’s anything that MacCready knows for sure, it means he’s going to be _paying_ for it soon. Too many coincidences aligning in his favor, or not. He looks up through bleary eyes and finds the caravaners staring down at him and the bloody mess of his face. And the rest of him.

“MacCready, what the hell have you gotten yourself into this time?”

“Miller. Pay caps to. Get me to Goodneighbor.”

“How many caps?”

“Fuck you, Miller,” he wheezes, promises forgotten for now. “I’ll pay. You know I’m good for it, you cheap fucking asshole.”

“Well,” one of the caravaners says, “I see he’s still his charming old self.”

MacCready thinks, _I may have to rethink this approach,_ and then _, I hope to fucking hell Miller’s not gonna do what I’d do_ , which is to say rob him and throw his bleeding corpse to the side of the road, and then, _I wonder where the Boss is, I should tell her what happened, she’d want to know,_ and _if she’s not dead_ before he passes the fuck out.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the glowing sea is not kind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i honestly can't remember if i've linked this before, but i did make a playlist for this series that i'm very fond of. if you'd like to give it a listen, it's [here](http://8tracks.com/adaysaved/your-bridges-are-burning). :D

When she leaves him asleep in the hotel room, sprawled out on the bed with a stupid grin on his face, she doesn’t look back. 

When she walks briskly through the door of the Rexford, she doesn’t look back.

When the neighborhood watchman tosses a casual greeting at her, she grunts a wordless reply and doesn’t look back.

On the road out from Goodneighbor, Rosa is _not_ running away. She is making a strategic retreat. It was easier to leave him there rather than arguing, especially since Mac never listens to her if he really, truly disagrees with her decisions. And if she’s moving at a double-step, even though she’s still a little drunk and sore from the night before, that’s because it’s important she makes it back to Sanctuary before he catches up with her and insists on following. Not for any other reason.

Leaving in the state she’s in is a rash decision, a risk she wouldn’t normally take. But she’s not thinking about that, she’s focused on putting one foot in the other and making it to Sanctuary. The longer she walks, the faster she sobers up. And inexplicably, the worse she feels, scraped empty and hollow.

The silence of the journey is remarkable. Despite her most best intentions, she’s gotten used to Mac’s steady stream of chatter and stupid jokes and constant bitching about smells, the weather, the cold and anything else that happens to catch his ire. If anything, it makes the long walks go by so much faster. Easier. It’s not just putting one foot in front of the other and forcing herself onward. Against her own better judgment, she finds that she sometimes likes the journey more than the end result. It’s a dangerous thing, to think that way. As soon as she realizes what she’s doing, she forces the unfamiliar feelings away. Focuses on her pace. Does not think about him at all.

By the time she makes it to Sanctuary, she’s completely sober and a little disappointed that she hasn’t had to fight anyone—the kind of mood she’s in, part of her almost wished someone would fucking try it.

She blows past Luz at the gates, ignores the young woman's cheery greeting. She’s aware it’s rude, and that the girl looks a little crestfallen, but she’s got shit to do and no time to talk. A quick review of the settlers at work in Sanctuary’s centersquare does not show her the man she’s actually looking for.

“Where’s Hancock?”

“He’s at the rear guard station, General,” Sturges says, his sleepy voice puzzled. He looks her up and down. “You sure you’re all right? You don’t look so—”

“I’m fine,” she says. Normally, her voice sounds exactly the way it sounds in her head: even and expressionless. This is more of a snarl. Even Dogmeat, usually so thrilled to see her, is hanging back. He only barks softly and slinks away back to his doghouse, doesn’t insist on twining himself around her legs begging for her to scratch behind his ears. 

She finds Hancock lazing on the guard station, his shotgun resting in his lap and his eyes scanning the horizon. As far as she can tell, he’s sober: that’s the one time she’s put her foot down. No chems on duty. 

“Hey, Hancock.”

“The prodigal returns, huh? What’s up?”

“How do you feel about an… excursion?”

“You know I’m always up for an adventure,” he says, and the shrewd eyes narrow at her. “I get the feeling this ain’t your usual, though. And for you, that’s sayin’ something.”

“It’s dangerous, so if you don’t want to—I understand. But I’m headed to the Glowing Sea to find a way into the Institute, and I think that out of everyone here, you’re probably best suited to not die there.’

Hancock grins at her, teeth surprisingly white in the burned ruin of his face. “Fuckin’ right, I’m up for that. I could go for some tanning.”

She exhales. Didn’t realize how unsettled she’d felt about it, about going alone. Everything that made up who she is seems to be slowly falling apart around her, and all she can do is keep _going_. “Good.”

“But you,” Hancock says. “Don’t think there’s enough Rad-X in the universe to prevent some permanent changes if you aren’t careful, feel me?”

“I was thinking a hazmat suit would do it. It’s risky, going in there without armor, but I’m not really… suited to living forever.”

“Yeah, immortality’s not a good look on everyone. Can’t all be as lucky as yours truly.”

Rosa packs more quickly and less thoroughly than she would normally, rushing it just in case Mac happens to catch up and insist on accompanying them. The pressure in her chest is back, squeezing tight. She’s never ventured as far south west as the Glowing Sea before. Had hoped it’d be unnecessary. She remembers very clearly watching the bombs fall and the sudden realization that her childhood home—and her family—were located somewhere in the middle of that mushroom cloud.

It will be fine. Whatever is left there now would be unrecognizable. 

She realizes that she’s been staring at the half-filled pack for several seconds, unmoving. _Get it together_. There’s no telling how long it will take to find Virgil in the midst of a blighted nuclear wasteland, but she’s also not sure how she’s going to manage the necessities—using the bathroom, eating, or sleeping, given the level of rads they’ll be dealing with. She packs some food, but mostly stimpacks and rad chems, hoping that they’ll be able to just push through the wilderness as quickly as possible so she doesn’t have to consider breaching the seal of the hazmat suit.

They set out together within the hour, with no sign of Mac on the horizon. Rosa is relieved, not disappointed. 

Traveling with Hancock isn’t exactly like traveling with Mac. She’s fond of the mayor and his sense of humor, general easy-going nature, and willingness to let her kill people who need to be killed without complaining. She’s more wary of his constant drug use, but there’s not a good way to broach the topic and especially not now. He hasn’t gotten _her_ killed before she’s finished the things she needs to do, and that’s all that matters.

As they approach the edge of the Glowing Sea and her Pip-Boy starts to chatter, Rosa sighs. “All right, Hancock, give me a second.” He turns away to give her some privacy, and she changes quickly out of her armor and into the hazmat suit. It’s not ideal. The suit itself is a little baggy (she’s lost weight—too much weight) and the lack of a proper fit is worrying, considering how she really needs it to hold together. The helmet smells old and musty and even though the breathing tubes _work_ , she can tell it’s not going to be a pleasant journey. She coughs and inhales the sour smell of sweat. 

Necessary. That’s what she keeps telling herself: all of this is necessary.

When he turns around and actually gets a look at her, Hancock laughs until he’s wheezing. “All _right_ , Jangles. Lookin’ good.”

“Very funny,” she says, voice distorted by the glass dome of her helmet. “You ready?”

“Hell yeah,” Hancock says, staring out onto the horizon, where the dark gray green clouds of a radstorm are beginning to gather. Yellow lightning flickers through them, threaded brief and bright. “Let’s go.”

The Commonwealth itself had been difficult to adjust to, those first few weeks. Familiar landmarks decimated to ruins. Green grass burnt brown. The home she’d built with Nate a shell of what they had had together. But even then, there was a certain sense of familiarity. The walls of the house still stood—mostly. The trees still grew, if wilted and stunted. There’s a certain order to the chaos of the wasteland, certain things she can expect, even when things are destroyed.

Now? The further into the Glowing Sea they walk, the worse things look. It’s as close to a vision of hell on earth as she can imagine, and she’s seen some terrible fucking things in her posthumous lifetime. Burning sulfur pools ooze bubbles of gas into the air. The trees blasted to the ground, matchstick stumps and all, the wood tinder-dry and ready to go up in flames at the drop of a spark. Little specks twisting and darting on the horizon betray the presence of stingwings and bloatflies. In the distance she thinks she can see flames, green-tinged and eerie. She leads the way down what used to be a road, and the empty shells of burned-out cars are still crumpled there where the blast hit them in some kind of weird automobile graveyard. 

The only sound she can hear is the harsh noise of her own breath, ragged and uneven, echoing through the helmet.

She’d grown up somewhere in this desert. Her parents died somewhere in this desert. Her little brother died somewhere in this desert. It’s impossible to even figure out _where_ , because the further she and Hancock walk into this hellscape, the further it seems to extend, and there are no landmarks except for small ruins, still standing, what look like miles apart. Brighton might be in here _somewhere_ , but as far as Rosa and reality are concerned, it’s been wiped from the face of the earth.

It’s not at all appropriate and drenched in irony, but for some odd reason the only thing she can think to do is to say the shehecheyanu. _Baruch atah adonai, eloheinu mulch ha’olam, shehecheyanu, v’kiyemanu, vehigianu, laz’man, hazeh_ —God will probably forgive her for the pure and fiery rage she feels in that moment, thanking Him for sustaining her and enabling her to reach this occasion. The opportunity to walk through the blasted remains of her childhood. Her thanks, as they often do, feel more like a curse. 

_Baruch atah adonai, eloheinu_ —

“Rosa—” Hancock says.

She realizes she’s been mumbling the prayer over and over, a sad attempt to ground herself. “Shit. Sorry, Hancock.”

“It’s cool, it’s cool. Just wasn’t sure if, you know, you were holding out on me or somethin’.”

Rosa is not given to humor, normally, but for a moment, she thinks she can see the appeal behind giving in to hysterical laughter. “No, that wasn’t drugs. Just prayer.”

“Never had a lot of use for that, myself.”

“At this rate, there’s probably not much use in it for me, either,” Rosa says, her boots splashing through an orangey-yellow sulfur pool. “Oh, shit—Hancock, head’s up.” The disturbance in the liquid’s woken up ferals sleeping dormant beneath it, and with wordless roars they rise. Thankfully, Hancock’s handy with the shotgun and between the two of them it’s barely even a challenge.

Even with intermittent firefights—the bloatflies are particularly aggressive in the sea, and the molerats extremely large and plentiful—she’s finding it easy to lose track of the time. When the scenery looks so much the same and she can’t stop to eat or piss it’s hard to differentiate until she looks at the time on her Pip-Boy and realizes they’ve only been walking for three hours, in a generally south-west direction.

“So, uh, this may not be the best time, but just in case…”

“What is it, Hancock?” Rosa asks. She’s scanning the horizon again as they crest over a hill; the last overlook they’d reached, she’d spotted a deathclaw below and they’d been able to kill it before it got too close. She doesn’t want a repeat of the last two times she’d tangled with one.

“Just wanted to clear something up, yeah? You and MacCready…”

“What about him?” She says it carefully. Keeps her voice uninflected, even. Her fingers are tight and white-knuckled against her rifle. She has not been thinking about Mac since they walked into the Glowing Sea, and it was a conscious decision.

Hancock’s face is also carefully expressionless, head cocked just a bit as he looks her over. “Just wanted to offer a thought or two, since we had that talk a while back and you did me a real solid by listening. What else are friends for?”

The sense of impending doom does not dissipate, but she says, “I don’t know.”

“Well. Runnin’ from shit doesn’t make it go away, and it sure as hell doesn’t make you feel any goddamn better about yourself. That’s it. That’s all I had to say, from one fucked up do-gooder to another, and you can take it or leave it.”

All Rosa feels in that moment is the strange broken-rib pressure in her chest that she’s come to associate closely with Robert Joseph MacCready. “Noted, Hancock.”

He looks over at her again, and she’s pretty sure if he had eyebrows, they’d be raised right now. “That’s it?”

“I—don’t have anything else to say. I’m not—”

Hancock snorts, but his voice is strangely—kind. If anyone else had used that voice on her, she would have decked them then and there. “Listen, Rosa, you don’t have to convince me. I’m just sayin’, it takes one to know one.”

It’s not that it _bothers_ her, not really. She very carefully does not think about any of it, through finding the Crater of Atom and getting actual directions to Virgil’s cave. She very carefully does not think about it as they set out on their way again. And she is certainly not thinking about it when they finally reach the cave and the huge radscorpion predators burst from the ground before her and Hancock yells a warning, slightly too late. 

She throws herself to the side and hits the ground hard, but not before the stinger slices through the hazmat suit and digs itself into the flesh of her arm. It jars hard against the bone and the venom burns through her arm before the scorpion vanishes into the ground in an explosion of earth. Her Pip-Boy’s going absolutely insane, the geiger counter shaking, but she doesn’t have the time to worry about that now even though the dose of Rad-X she’d taken before setting out has definitely worn off now. She lunges forward, fumbling her rifle into position because it’s sure as hell going to be absolutely necessary in a moment.

The scorpion explodes from the earth in front of her—distantly, she can hear Hancock yelling curses and the burst of a shotgun shell, so the second scorpion’s still alive—and she holds her breath as she takes the shot. The scorpion rears back, the bullet having ripped off part of its mandibles. It lunges for her again, and time seems to slow around her as she focuses everything she has on standing her ground, lining up that shot, and squeezing the trigger as smoothly as she can when a ton of arachnid is bearing down on her.

This shot takes it down, its tiny head completely destroyed.

She doesn’t have time to check on Hancock, because with the suit breached, she’s going to die if she doesn’t do something about it quickly. She staggers to her feet and forces herself to take the necessary steps to reach the cave. If she reaches the cave, she can take off the helmet and drink some Rad-X. Or hook up an IV for the RadAway. Or both. She’s sweating like a pig and her vision is blurry and she is not ready to die yet. The entrance is very small, tucked into the rock face. She lurches forward and into a string of tin can alarms that, at any other time, she would’ve seen coming and disarmed. 

The sound is loud and echoing, like her breath.

Rosa fumbles with the seal catch on the helmet, releasing it. The Pip-Boy’s still chattering, but not as badly as outside. She’s going to fucking vomit.

“Hey,” Hancock says, crouching next to her. He’s already got the stimpack out. “Hey, hey, chill— _chill,_ you’re gonna be okay.”

She does feel a little better after he jabs it into her arm. The initial, painful burn of the medicine through her veins shakes her out of her stupor and she mumbles, “Rad-X.” She’s taken a hell of a lot of rads, but they don’t have time for RadAway right now. She can almost feel the stimpack working, but she also knows that one of the side effects of radscorpion venom is hallucinations. So that’s not exactly encouraging.

Eventually, she’s solid enough to lurch to her feet, even though she has to lean on Hancock a little as they make their way further into the cave and, finally, meet Virgil.

It takes some convincing Virgil, of course, that she’s not there to kill him. Less so that she’s not much of a threat given that she’s swaying on her feet as they’re talking. Thankfully, Hancock has the presence of mind to explain exactly what they’re doing there. While he does it, Rosa struggles to stay upright and occasionally interjects other information—she’s trying to find her son. She’s trying to find her son. Even that statement sounds strange, since it’s not true. She wants vengeance. She wants to kill all of them. She wants to live long enough to do that. The stimpack’s helped a bit—not as much as it would have, given the level of rads outside, she doesn’t even _want_ to look at the meter on her Pip-Boy—but she can still feel the muscles in her arm twitching and the nausea rising in her stomach. She’s not going to vomit. She will not vomit on the supermutant’s boots. 

“Hold on a moment,” she says, and jabs herself with another stimpack.

From above the comically tiny glasses perched on his nose, Virgil frowns at her. “I understand you’re trying to find your son, but in this state, you’re not going to be able to make it back to the Commonwealth, let alone take out a courser.”

“Let me… worry about that,” Rosa says, gritting her teeth.

After that, it’s just a matter of details. With his rudimentary lab, Virgil’s able to reseal the hazmat suit, so unless she gets really unlucky, she probably won’t die on the journey back. 

In the end, she doesn’t, but not for the Commonwealth’s lack of attempts. It’s mostly thanks to Hancock watching her back and making sure nothing picks her off while she’s busy forcing to herself to keep walking. By the time they make it back into Sanctuary, it’s all she can do to stay on her feet and not pass out while she finds a vein and slides the needle on a pack of RadAway into it. It’s going to be a few days before she really feels anything like herself again. 

But something isn’t right and, while she’s catching up on the news with Preston, she realizes exactly what it is. “Preston, where’s MacCready?”

“I don’t know, General. He hasn’t been back here since the two of you left for Goodneighbor.”

“I see,” Rosa says. Her voice sounds very even, very strange, even to her own ears. She’s filthy, covered in blood and radscorpion guts, she doesn’t want to think too much about the implications of the Glowing Sea, and she feels like she’s going to throw up at any moment—whether that’s lingering results of the venom or radsickness, she’s not entirely sure. 

Preston sighs, his eyes weary. “I’d tell you that you need to take some time off your feet because you look like you’re going to die, but that’s not going to do anything to stop you, is it?” 

A sane person would listen to Preston and take his advice, because he is a kind, reasonable person with her best interests in mind. 

But Rosa doesn’t answer, because she’s already setting off at a run. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> maccready fucks things up, as is his habit.

MacCready wakes up in a goddamn bed, which is a relief because that means a) he's not fucking dead yet and b) Lucas Miller didn't rob him and dump his corpse on the side of the road. He fumbles his hands around and it seems like he's even got some caps left in his pocket. There's something to be said for doing good deeds only when you know someone's gonna be able to pay you back for it later, and picking off those bandits for Miller on the road months ago turned out well enough.

Less fantastic is his current state of health, because while he's no fucking doctor it seems... bad, and his current mental state, which is a little too fucking similar to the time he scavved some Buffout from an old hospital, took a hit in a tough spot, and couldn't see straight for a week. He's hot and cold at the same time, skin clammy, and he can't figure out whether it's the puncture wounds (mostly closed, thanks to some liberal use of stimpacks) that hurt the most or the general, burning ache that's swept over him. It's hard to focus.

_Oh, hell, it's a fever_ , he thinks, and closes his eyes again.

He wakes up several more times throughout the night or the day. He's not really sure of the time. The room doesn't have any windows, so it's hard to tell the passage of time, and it takes pretty much all of his energy to stagger over to the isolated room the Rexford uses as a bathroom, so it's not like he's going outside to check.

_This was not one of your brightest fucking ideas, MacCready_ , he thinks, but it's too late now.

It's not like he's never been sick before. There'd been a spotted fever that itched like _hell_  that had swept through Little Lamplight when he was twelve, and he'd gotten that. He'd even had the little spots on his tongue and in his throat, and Lucy had laughed at him because he'd complained so much. But he'd had Lucy then, they all did, to take care of them. A cool hand to soothe the sweat away from your forehead. There with water in the night. Oh, she'd had some biting words to offer along with it, of fucking course, but she'd been _there_.

Here, he's alone, and that's part of the fucking problem. In Little Lamplight there was always someone around, no matter how much you didn't want them to be. If he was sad, he could yell at someone until he felt better. If he was sick, Lucy was there to hold his hand through it. Now there's just the room and the silence, and the ache in his muscles and bones. It's not like he's gonna die, or anything. At least, he doesn't think so. Lucy had told him once that a fever was just the body's way of fighting off infection, and he figures if there's anything dirtier in the Commonwealth than feral teeth, he hasn't fucking found it yet.

So the fever's a good sign, even if it is... unpleasant. And not breaking.

Part of him wonders if the Boss will ever figure it out, if she knows where he is. Not like it fucking matters.

But he wonders.

Time passes very fucking slowly, or very quickly. He's not entirely sure after a while. He's awake, then he's not awake. Chills wrack him, then he's burning up. Sometimes at the same time. His dreams are a jumbled mess: Duncan sick, Duncan well. He wakes up from at least one nightmare in which he'd found the cure and brought it home, only to have Duncan die anyway. The one constant is discomfort. Time and reality are a little more mutable.

He might've been sick before, but he doesn't remember being _this_ sick.

At one point, he's so fucking delirious he's almost positive that he can feel a hand on his forehead and logically that must be Lucy. His best girl.

"I don't know who the hell your best girl is, but I think you're worse off than I thought," a woman says dryly, and he realizes that he must've said that aloud. Then he realizes that wasn't Lucy's voice.

"Boss?"

"In the flesh," she says. And then grabs him by the shoulders and fucking shakes him like he's a dog that pissed on the bed. or something. "What the hell were you _thinking_ , you goddamn idiot?"

"Stop that," he attempts to order her, trying to push her away. It's not exactly easy to do, since his arms are fucking weak as anything, but he tries. He opens his eyes.

She stops shaking him, but he can still feel her hands gripping his shoulders. She's sitting on the narrow bed next to him, legs curled under her, wearing only a t-shirt and her underwear, which is strange enough and almost convinces him he's still dreaming. She looks fucking awful. There's a scabbed over mess on her arm and her face is worn and drawn. 

He ignores the angry question and points his finger at her injury. "Could ask the same of you." His voice sounds strange, higher than it usually does. If he had more energy he could appropriately convey how fucking angry he actually is. As it is, he's about as threatening as a wet noodle discarded from the Diamond City noodle bar.

The Boss is, of course, not impressed. She lets him go, fingers curled in fists, knuckles white. " _I'm_  not the one running a hundred and three degree fever and looking like I got run through a goddamn garbage disposal, Mac!"

"How did you figure that--never mind, I don't wanna know," he says, and falls back against the pillow with a groan. "What's a garbage disposal?"

Of course she ignores him. " _What the hell, Mac._ What did you--whatever the hell it was, you could have waited for me."

"Nah," he says, and tries to grin at her. The effect's probably fucking horrifying, all things considered.

She breathes out a long, slow breath. "We'll discuss this later."

"How'd you even..."

"When I got back to Sanctuary, you weren't there," she says flatly. "So I figured you'd gone and done something stupid."

"Yeah, well, you're one to f--one to talk, Boss. When I'm feeling better I'll ask about the Glowing Sea and--" Something dawns on him, then, and because he has no goddamn sense of self-preservation and the combined effects of the fever and not really eating anything for at least a few goddamn days are really fucking with him, opens his stupid fucking mouth. "Wait a minute. Wait. You were _worried_  about me."

The scowl she turns on him would probably have been terrifying if he wasn't a combination of fucking thrilled at the realization and exhausted. "I tracked you down so I could kill you _myself_."

"You were," he says, hand stroking her thigh. Maybe he's delirious, but that's perfectly fucking fine with him at the moment. "You were worried."

"You smell fucking _terrible_ ," she tells him, instead, still glaring.

"Thanks, Boss. Love you too," he mumbles, before he can stop himself. Thankfully, she probably just chalked that one up to the delirium.

He's entirely unsurprised that the Boss is about as terrible as he would've expected her to be in a caregiving role. She's not at all sympathetic or soft. She tells him to stop whining when he wakes from a fever dream, gasping. Her hands are brusque and efficient and a little harsh when she helps him out of the bed. She's not at all amenable to the fact that he doesn't want to eat or drink anything anything and basically forcefeeds him some disgusting soup from the bar downstairs and water whenever he opens his fucking mouth.

"If I'd known this is what your nursing was going to be like," he grumbles at her at one point, "I'd've made a point of dying earlier." It's not true, but she punches him in the shoulder anyway. "Ow."

"The next time you say something like that I'm _really_  going to let you have it."

He's too tired to even make a joke about how he'd really like her to let him have it.

But even though he still feels like shit and probably smells even worse, she stays with him. When he wakes up in the night, she's curled up next to him, her arms wrapped around his waist, and somehow, that's more than enough to buoy him through the worst of his fucking _failure_. Just knowing that she's there: that she found him, and that she stayed. By the third or fourth day, when he's finally feeling decent enough to stand up and try to wash the worst of the sick smell away, she's immediately on his case again.

He stands in the corner, awkwardly washing himself with the basin of the cold water and a washcloth, when she starts in on him and this is _not_  how he thought this goddamn conversation was going to go.

"So do you want to tell me what the _fuck_  you thought you were doing?" 

"It's... a long story."

"We've got all the goddamn time in the world, Mac."

"So, uh, I guess I never really properly thanked you for helping me take out Winlock and Barnes..."

"I told you, you didn't need to thank me," the Boss says shortly. She's sitting on the bed watching him, legs crossed and elbows resting on her knees. He's not gonna say it, of course, because she'd fucking kill him, but whatever happened to her in the Glowing Sea, he's pretty sure she needed the rest as well. The dark circles are still there under her eyes, but she doesn't look like she's about to keel the fuck over. What a fucking pair they made, Christ.

"Well, f--I do, so you can stop arguing with me, yeah? Look. You stuck your neck out for me, and I don't forget shit--uh, I mean, things like that."

"Mac, you _can_ curse in front of me--you know I'm not your mother, right?"

MacCready shudders reflexively. He puts the cloth down. It's definitely not how he thought this conversation was going to. He kind of fucking wishes she'd waited until he at least put on some pants. "I know _that_. I just... look, it's not about you, it's about a promise I made."

"I don't follow."

He takes a deep breath. It's fucking hard to say all of this. He'd kept Lucy and Duncan so close to his chest for so fucking long, a secret out of necessity and out of caution, that it almost feels wrong to talk about them now, even to her. "When I left the Capital Wasteland, I didn't just leave Little Lamplight behind. I left my... my family behind. I had a beautiful wife--" if he wasn't watching her face, he might have missed it, the way something flickers painfully across it before she hides it again, "--and a son we named Duncan. He's the one I made the promise to... a promise to clean up my act. To be a better person. Guess that sounds pretty stupid coming from a guy who shoots people for a living."

The Boss is silent for a very long moment. Her fists are clenched again, but there's nothing on her face. No expression. No movement.

He realizes, after a minute, what that must've fucking sounded like. "Goddamnit, I'm fucking this up--Boss. I wasn't--I mean. Lucy--Lucy died a few years back, and Duncan is all I've got left."

"I--don't know what to say," she says. Her voice is controlled as always. Mouth a thin line. He's starting to learn that there's a hell of a lot more underneath all of that. 

"Sure you do," he says, not entirely able to keep the bitterness from his voice. "You want to tell me how cruel it was to leave them behind, right?" The silence is as much of an answer as he needs. It's not like she doesn't know what it's like to lose someone--he was with her when she buried her husband. "My son... he's sick. I don't know what's wrong with him. One day, he's playing out in the fields behind our farm... the next he took a fever and these blue boils popped up all over his body. Last I saw he was almost too weak to walk. I didn't dare ask him to come with me. Honestly, I don't know how much longer he's going to last."

"So what," the Boss says, quiet and deadly, "are you doing up here?" 

"Looking for a goddamn cure! What the h--what do you think I was doing to end up this way? I've been looking for it the entire time I've been in the wastes, and I only left Duncan behind because the doctors in the Capitol couldn't do shit for him. Jesus, Boss, I thought that out of everyone you'd--"

"That _I'd_ understand? I've been fucking--"

"What was it you told me on the overpass in Quincy? 'I'm not looking for my son'? Boss, you don't f--you don't _know_..."

She looks down at her hands. Her posture is stiff. A frozen statue. "Tell me what you've found."

"I just recently ran into a guy named Sinclair who claimed his buddy caught some kind of disease. I thought he was wasting my time until he said his partner broke out in blue boils. They'd dug up information about a cure at a place called Med-Tek Research. They even managed to grab the building's lockdown security codes. Unfortunately, Sinclair's buddy died before they were able to break into the facility. I mean, there's no way that's a coincidence, right? Med-Tek has to be the place. So I went there."

"And nearly got yourself chewed to bits, I see. Can you trust this Sinclair guy?"

MacCready shrugs. The worst of the wounds have closed over by now, and the ache from the fever is gone. Thanks, in part, to her. "To be honest, I don't know him from Adam. But he brought up the blue boils and the sickness his partner suffered from. There's no way that's a coincidence... or a trap. Wouldn't make any sense. If Sinclair says Med-Tek Research is the place, that's where we need to go... I need to get past those ferals... otherwise I got nothing else."

There's something about her face, then, the brief wince, that aches almost the same as the fever. "If the cure's there, I'll help you get it."

"Boss... thank you. When you're ready, just take us out there and..." He swallows, hard. He feels fucking ridiculous, but he wants her to _know_. What it means to him, that she's willing to do this despite everything. "What you're doing. No one's ever cared that much about me before. Even if it takes the rest of my life... I'll repay this debt to you. I swear it."

"Don't repay it," she says. For some strange reason, she sounds very fucking tired. Furious and tired. "Mac, this a friendship, not a fucking ledger. Don't repay me, just fucking _tell me these things._ I'd have helped you from the moment you told me, if you had actually told me..."

For a minute he's tempted to laugh in her face. A _friendship._ Yeah, right, that's what they had between them."Would you have? It's not like you tell _me_ anything unless it suits you, Boss."

"I would have." Each word is enunciated, carved from ice.

"Well, I couldn't. You don't know what it's like out in the wasteland, Boss. Not really. You're lucky you found Garvey and the Minutemen, that you--hell, that you found me, even. But people out here, they'll stab you in the back as soon as look at you. I didn't want to... I didn't want to risk Duncan's safety, for fu--not for anything. And by the time you came along I guess I'd... I'd just gotten into the habit of it."

She just shakes her head again, and looks up at him. In that moment she's not the Boss--not the indomitable fucking Fury leaving death and destruction in her wake--she's just a woman. A woman he fucking loves, all right, and disappointed. For that long moment he contemplates crossing the room, taking her in his arms--but something prevents him. Instead, she stands. 

"We'll go. _I'll_ go. But I... need some time." And with that she's gone, leaving him standing there goddamn naked and freezing and feeling like a deathclaw's just run him over.

He remembers early on in their association, thinking that he was going to be incredibly careful not to ruin things.

Fucking hell, he cocked that one up.

MacCready puts his goddamn clothes on, and goes after her.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> conversations.

By the time he makes it outside (moving slower than he’d like to admit), she’s already gone. Not _gone_ —he knows her well enough by now to be sure she’s still in Goodneighbor, somewhere. She wouldn’t’ve gone through all of the trouble worrying about him, tracking him down, and verbally eviscerating him out just to leave because she was upset. He could find her if he went looking. The urgent need to do just that—to make things _right_ —hasn’t left him. It’s just tempered by experience. If there’s one fucking thing she doesn’t need, he realizes, standing like an idiot in the door of the Rexford, it’s him barreling after her and fucking things up even worse.

The MacCready of five years ago wouldn’t’ve been able to do it. Hell, the MacCready of 2287 can barely do it. But instead of bursting into the Third Rail, or the Memory Den, or the state house, or any number of places she might be, he takes a deep breath and lets her go.

It’s raining, and the drops collect on the brim of his cap and drip in front of his eyes as he walks toward Daisy’s shop. Despite the rain, and despite the fact that her counter’s always fucking spotless no matter the constant patina of filth that overs everything in Goodneighbor, the ghoul is polishing it with grim efficiency. She looks up when she hears his footsteps, but her smile fades when she sees how badly he’s been chewed up.

“MacCready! You’re alive! I was almost about to mail that letter, you know.”

He laughs, because that’s what he does when he doesn’t want to fucking deal with something. This week’s been providing that in goddamn spades. “Well, you almost needed to send it, Daisy. Guess I got in just under the wire, huh?”

“It’s the sixth day,” she says, and looks at the healing wounds that cover him, wounds the stimpaks haven’t entirely healed. “I’m assuming that was some kind of explanation for your son, wasn’t it?”

“You guessed it,” MacCready replies. He looks down at the counter, traces his finger along the wood grains. Not a speck of dust on it, of course. “So I’m going to have to ask you not to send it.”

“Good lord, MacCready, you have to start taking better care of yourself. What would your son have _done_ if I’d had to mail that letter?”

“He’s with his Aunt Sarah, and he’d… he’d have been fine.” ‘Aunt Sarah’ is what Duncan’s always liked to call the woman MacCready first met when he was a thirteen year old little shit in a mining helmet, carrying a sniper rifle almost as big as he was. All she’d ever wanted to do, after the events in the Wasteland, was settle down in peace. The chance addition of the MacCready family to her small farm hasn’t bothered her much. Duncan loves her. She loves him. He knows that if anything happens to him, Duncan will be all taken care of and it’s that thought that keeps him going, most days. The treacherous accompaniment— _maybe he’d be better off without you_ —is never far behind. Just easier to ignore.

Daisy raises her eyebrows, and for a second MacCready has the uncomfortable feeling that her rheumy eyes are looking straight fucking through him. “That’s about as far from the truth as can be, and I think you know it.”

“Yeah, well.” he shrugs, looking away. “Sometimes you don’t have a choice. I told you he was sick, right, Daisy? I think I’d found the cure.”

“I see,” Daisy says, and pats his hand. Her skin is tight and leathery, her fingers cold, but there’s warmth in that gesture nevertheless. “Not as easy as you thought?”

“I wasn’t expecting f— _easy_ , Daisy, I just wanted to save my son. But the ferals… damn, there were too many of them. I couldn’t…”

Now it’s her turn to look away. Like many ghouls, she has complicated feelings towards ferals. She doesn’t know the whole story, of course—that’s one of the things he’s just too fucking ashamed to tell anyone, even someone like Daisy, someone who’s willing to _help_ —but she’s both ashamed, terrified, and sympathetic whenever the topic gets brought up. There but for the fucking grace of god, and all of that pre-war bullshit.“I’m sorry, MacCready.”

“Yeah, me too, Daisy. Thanks for agreeing to send that letter. And for holding off on it.”

“Of course, kid,” she says, with a sniff. If ghouls could shed a tear… “What’re friends for?”

That hits a little too close to home, so he makes his goodbyes and beats a hasty retreat. 

There’s not that much to do in Goodneighbor and only so much wandering around in the goddamn rain that he’s willing to do before he starts to get bored and (if he’s being entirely fucking honest with himself) missing the Boss. It’s a strange feeling, and one he’s not much used to anymore. He’d missed Lucy like crazy, in the years since her passing. Missed her with a kind of physical intensity, a knot in his chest. That’s dimmed, somewhat. This is different. When he thinks about the Boss, he thinks about all of the things that make her _her_ , make her alive and real and solid. The deadpan face that he’s learned isn’t so much a deadpan as a careful, easily broken mask. Her brusque, harsh way of talking. The delicacy with which she folds up her glasses, the only fucking time in her life that world could be applied to her. Her determination to keep fucking _moving_ , no matter what. Her strength—all of it. When she’s not there, somehow, the world just seems a little grayer.

Fucking hell.

He knows her well enough to make an educated guess about where she’s gone. The rain’s stopped, mostly. In the distance, just in time for the sun to set, it’s starting to break through the worst of the clouds. He walks briskly to the Old State House, his head down. The Neighborhood Watch doesn’t give him trouble anymore, now that the Boss is kind of a big deal around here. 

By the time he gets to the top of the spiral stairs, struggling a little towards the end (goddamn, that fever took more out of him than he thought), he catches sight of Fahrenheit lounging in Hancock’s chair. Since the mayor’s been away more often than not, she’s stepped up to fill in his shoes. He knows it’s probably not easy, in a place like Goodneighbor. Not alone. But she does it. She nods at him, and he nods back—the secret, unspoken kinship of the hopelessly fucking loyal. They barely know each other, but he’s got more than a sneaking suspicion they understand each other all too goddamn well.

“She here?”

“Been up on the roof for hours.”

“Thanks, Fahrenheit.”

“Any time, MacCready.”

The climb out the window onto the gently sloping roof barely takes any time, although he takes it easy—the shingles are still wet from the rain. The Boss is sitting on the peak of the roof, smoking a cigarette and staring out at the horizon. Watching the sun set and explosives burst in the distance. He can tell she’s been sitting out here for a while because her hair is plastered against her forehead and neck and her fatigues are several shades darker than usual. She doesn’t look at him as he sits down next to her, just passes him the cigarette.

He takes a drag, and exhales. They sit in silence for a long time.

“I’m… sorry,” she says. It’s not grudging. Just awkward. 

“Sorry for what?”

She snorts. “I just—I don’t like surprises. I didn’t—handle that very well.”

“Yeah, me neither. On both f—counts. It’s fine,” he says. It’s not fine, and she probably knows it, but that’s where they are at the moment. He stubs out the cigarette against the shingles, and when she goes to light another, he leans forward to cup his hands around it so that the wind won’t blow it out. 

“It’s not. I didn’t handle it well,” she says again. “I didn’t… Not like I should have. I’m not…”

He can tell she wants to say something else, but she’s hesitating, for whatever reason. In profile, her face is a blank, mouth a thin line, but there’s a tension in her shoulders he recognizes all too well. He wonders if she’s been out here in the rain this entire time, how uncomfortable it must be to sit in wet clothes and armor. You could never tell just by looking at her, like she’s been carved from stone. He knows that’s not true, knows how fucking deeply she feels things, and he almost ruins the moment and reaches out to take her in his arms.

“Mac… do you ever wonder what I was like? Before the war?”

“Of course I f—of course I do, Boss.” He thinks about it more than he’d like to admit. Thinks about what she must have looked like, felt like—thinks about her husband more than he probably should. He thinks about her all the fucking time.

“I don’t know what you think of me. What I was like. But I was a mess,” she says. The words are short and clipped. He doesn’t know why she’s telling him this, but he can tell how fucking hard it is. “I didn’t—I was always so fucking scared of failure. I couldn’t let myself stop running. I was—an angry kid. I was always fighting _something_ , until there wasn’t anything left to fight anymore. I had my religion and I had the Army, and I think that kept me… right. Kept me human. But I wasn’t happy. It wasn’t _easy._ Every day I had to fight with myself to get up, to keep moving. To do the right thing. To be _good_.” 

She trails off and he sees, for the first time, that her hands are shaking—just barely—where they’re holding the cigarette. He realizes, for the first time, that the last few days have taken more of a toll on her than he’d realized. It’s easy to fucking forget it, with the way she just keeps—going. 

“And even then, it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t any good at law school, and I left the Army and I was terrified of having a kid and not being able to handle it and—fuck, Mac, what does it say about me that I’m better at living in the Commonwealth than I ever was at _home_? The first time I killed someone, I didn’t even feel sorry. He was going to kill me, and I shot him in the chest. And he fell. And I shot him in the head just to make sure he was dead. And I was _happy_. It was _easy_. I’m—”

“You’re alive,” he says simply. “That’s all that matters.”

“Does it?” She looks at him from the corner of her eye, the eye narrowly missed by the claws of a monster. “What makes me any fucking different than any of the people I’ve killed? The people I’m going to kill?”

“You are different.” It’s the only thing he can say. He can’t explain to her why—not yet, he’s not fucking brave enough. “You’re not like anyone else I’ve met out here, Boss. Right—life in the Wastelands ain’t easy. And the only thing I know about life before the war’s what I read in books, so I can’t tell you one way or another how you were or how much of a mess you were. But I told you, and I f—I meant it—you’re the first person I’ve really been able to trust here. To know that no matter what, you’ve got my back, and I’ve got yours. That’s _not_ nothing. You’re… _shit_ , I—”

“I thought you were trying not to curse,” she says. She laughs. No humor in it.

He ignores that. “Look, Boss. I get it, I do. When I left Little Lamplight for Bigtown, I felt the same way. I didn’t know who I was anymore, without that responsibility. Without that identity. Without an entire town to run, without kids to keep in line. I was a great fucking mayor, right? I was _damned good_ at what I did. I was _the mayor_ for six goddamn years. But without it—trying to figure out how to, Jesus, how to live—I did a lot of things I ain’t proud of. Okay? A lot of things. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s not always what you do that matters. It’s who you are. And why you do it. I may be a failure at that, too. But I’m trying to be better. And you…” Jesus Christ, he’s fucking babbling complete nonsense. Whatever happened to his resolution not to curse, whatever happened to his resolution to _keep his goddamn mouth shut_?

She’s staring at him, now, her dark eyes wide. Cigarette forgotten. The sun’s set and in the neon lights and street lamps of Goodneighbor, he almost thinks he can see a gleam in her eyes, a gleam he’s seen exactly once before, when they buried Nate in the back yard of her home. On impulse, he reaches out to brush the strands of wet hair away from her face, and her eyes slip shut. It’s a gentle touch. Strangely out of place, given the conversation. But she leans into it, almost without realizing it. His chest’s going to fucking explode.

When she finally opens her eyes, she can’t even look at him. The words come out in a rush. “Mac. I’ll let you go. You don’t have to do this with me anymore. It’s not—it’s not fair.”

It’s a little like being smacked in the side of the head by a baseball bat when you’ve been taking a nice nap in a fucking ruin. “What? Do _what_?”

“This. All of it. Mac, I have nothing to offer you. _Nothing_.”

“Hey,” he says, instead of any of the other things he’d _like_ to say. The things that keep him awake at night, more and more often these days. “Hey. I’m not going anywhere.”

She breathes out. In anyone else it’d be a shaky exhalation. In her, it’s more like a sudden gasp, barely audible, like she’s been stabbed in the back. She doesn’t say anything. Takes some time to collect herself. “I always forget how young you actually are, when you say things like that.”

“Boss, I was never young. I never got the chance.”

“I know.” Her fingers, cold from the rain and exposure, slip between his. Her grip is bruising.

“Boss, this world—it is what it is. And we do what we have to do. It don’t make you any less. My first year as the mayor, I saw one of our kids—a scout—get torn limb from limb while he was still alive. I couldn’t do a damned thing to save him. He was still breathing when I finally got to him, but he was… it was bad. I ended it for him. I still think about that one.”

“When I was ten, a playground fight seemed like the end of the world.”

“And now you’re here. And Boss, you’re doing a hell of a job, okay?”

She looks away again, but doesn’t move when he strokes his thumb against her hand. “Tomorrow, we’ll get your cure. I promise.”

“I know. You’re always good as your word.” 

They both need the sleep—especially if they’re heading out for Med-Tek in the morning. It’s cold, he’s still feeling shaky, and the roof’s uncomfortable as hell, but right now he wouldn’t move for all the goddamn caps in the world.


End file.
